Paris Mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has inaugurated an alley bearing the name of Mireille Knoll, a 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who was brutally murdered in her apartment in a antisemitic attack.
The alley is located on the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, in the 11th arrondissement of the French capital.
Knoll was brutally murdered in her apartment in a antisemitic attack on March 23, 2018. Firefighters who arrived at Knoll’s building later that night to answer an emergency call discovered her partially-burned body with 11 stab wounds.
Two men, Yacine Mihoub, 31, and his associate Alex Carrimbacus, 26, have been charged with the killing. They apparently targeted Knoll after Mihoub, a neighbor of Knoll’s since the age of eight, told Carrimbacus that she would have plenty of money as she was Jewish.
A police investigation following Knoll’s death established that Mihoub was attracted to Islamist ideas and slogans and that he was “compulsively addicted to antisemitic websites and a staunch defender of Hamas.”
The antisemitic nature of the murder of the octogenarian was confirmed in November 2020 by the Paris Court of Appeal which rejected a request of the two murderers to have the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism removed from the charge sheet. They will go on trial on October 25.