Prosecutors are treating the murder as an anti-Semitic hate crime because one of the men said he had overheard the other “talking about Jews’ money and their wealth” and that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) while stabbing her.
Two men are on trial since Tuesday in Paris over the brutal antisemitic murder of an elderly Jewish woman.
The partly burned body of Mireille Knoll, a 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was found in her apartment in the centre of Paris after she had been stabbed 11 times before her home was set on fire.
The two men charged with her brutal murder with the aggravating circumstance of antisemitic hatred are Alex Carrimbacus, a 25-year-old homeless man with psychiatric problems and Yacine Mihoub, the 31-year-old son of one of Kroll’s neighbours.The two met in prison and have past convictions for theft and violence, each blaming the other for her death.
Mihoub’s mother, Zoulikha Khellaf, is also on trial, charged with having cleaned the knife that was used to murder Knoll, who suffered from Parkinson’s Disease and could move only with the aid of a walking frame.
“We will need a miracle for the truth to come out of their mouths,” Gilles-William Goldnadel, a lawyer acting for Knoll’s family, told reporters as he entered the court, adding that it was a case of “anti-Semitism motivated by financial gain.”
Prosecutors are treating the murder as an anti-Semitic hate crime because one of the men said he had overheard the other “talking about Jews’ money and their wealth” and that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) while stabbing her.
The investigation had also shown that Mihoub had an “ambivalent” attitude towards Islamic extremism, prosecutors claim.
“They’re monsters,” Knoll’s son, Daniel Knoll, told reporters at the start of the trial. He said his family ‘’expects a very severe verdict.”
Both Mihoub and Carrimbacus were present in court or the trial which is due to last until November 10.
A series of antisemitic murders
The murder was the latest in a series of antisemitic attacks that have horrified France’s Jewish community and exacerbated concern about how rising Islamic extremism is fuelling anti-Semitism.
In 2012, Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah shot dead three children and a teacher at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse.
Three years later, another Islamist gunman killed four people in a hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
In 2017, a Jewish woman in her sixties, Sarah Halimi, was thrown out of the window of her Paris apartment by a neighbour shouting “Allahu Akhbar”.
France’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the killer, Kobili Traore, was not criminally responsible for crime after succumbing to a “delirious fit” under the influence of drugs and could not go on trial.
A ruling which infuriated Halimi’s family as well as Jewish groups, and prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to urge a change in French law to ensure people face responsibility for violent crimes while under the influence of drugs.
It also prompted protests in Israel.
Speaking about Knoll, Macron, who attended the woman’s funeral, had said her killer “murdered an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish and in doing so had sullied our most sacred values and our memory.”
As a nine-year-old child in 1942, Mireille Knoll survived the “Vel d’Hiv” round-up, when French police officers organized the deportation of 13,000 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.