PARIS —Three years to the day after the terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket at in Paris, a kosher store in Créteil, near the French capital, already targeted by anti-Semitic tags a few days ago, was torched during the night to Tuesday.
The fire was reported between 4:00 am and 5:00 am and “there is a priori very large damage,” said the prosecutor, Laure Beccuau. No one was hurt in the fire, which caused severe damage to the affected stores.
The store, “Promo & Destock”, whose manager is Muslim, was one of two kosher stores that had been covered with five swastikas on January 3. “The criminal track is privileged,” te prosecutor said.
According to the watchdog National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, the criminals wanted to sanction the Muslim manager because he declared he has no problem to sell kosher and Israeli products for the Jewish clientele.’’
The fire spread to an adjacent store, the kosher supermarket HyperCacher, which was also covered with anti-Semitic inscriptions last week.
An investigation was opened for voluntary degradation by fire. . “It is too early to discuss motivations for this act, “warned a source close to the investigation.
The fire occurs three years to the day after the attack of the Hyper Cacher supermarket on Porte de Vincennes, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, during which four people were killed on January 9, 2015. ”
The tags had provoked the indignation of the Jewish associations, who perceived them as a direct reference to this attack.