A man who murdered Mireille Knoll, a 85-year-old French Jewish woman, in a savage antisemitic crime in 2018, was sentenced Wednesday by a court to life prison with no chance of parole for 22 years.
A murder which caused an outcry over anti-Semitism in France.
Yacine Mihoub, 32, stabbed the woman, a Holocaust survivor, 11 times. Her body was partly burned after her Paris apartment was set alight on 23 March 2018.
The man’s accomplice Alex Carrimbacus, 25, was jailed for 15 years for robbery, motivated by anti-Semitism.
Carrimbacus claimed that Mihoub, who had multiple convictions for violence, shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ (‘God is greatest’) while stabbing her. The murder was classified as anti-Semitic after Carrimbacus told investigators he overheard Mihoub arguing with Kroll on the day of her death “about Jews money and their wealth.”
French President Emmanuel Macron attended the funeral of Knoll, who had survived the 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jews in Paris during WWII by fleeing with her mother to Portugal.
Mihoub, who is the son of one of Kroll’s neighbours, denied any hand in her death, blaming Carrimbacus instead.
The murder caused added repugnance because she was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and could not move unassisted.
Knoll’s son Daniel told the court that when his mother let Mihoub, who had done odd jobs for her for years, into her home ‘’she never expected that the person she had protected for years would become her executioner.’’
Prosecutors also pointed to messages glorifying jihadist attacks found in Mihoub’s prison cell as proof of his anti-Semitism.