On March 23, 2018, the body of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was found stabbed with 11 stab wounds and partially charred in her apartment in eastern Paris.
The Jewish community had sharply criticized a 2019 court ruling that found Sarah Halimi’s killer unfit to stand trial.
A Paris prosecutor demanded that two suspects in the murder of Mireille Knoll, a Jewish woman killed in Paris in March 2018, to be tried for murder that was aggravated by anti-Semitic hatred.
On March 23, 2018, the body of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was found stabbed with 11 stab wounds and partially charred in her apartment in eastern Paris.
Yacine Mihoub, 28, a son of Knol’s neighbor who had known her all his life, and his friend Alex Carrimbacus, 22, were indicted.
In its final indictment, the public prosecutor’s office requests that the two men appear for “intentional homicide on a vulnerable person and on the grounds of the victim’s true or supposed belonging to a religion’’, “theft on a vulnerable person in a meeting in living quarters and arson.’’
It is now up to the examining magistrates to follow or not the analysis of the prosecution on the anti-Semitic character of this case which had aroused strong indignation, a year after the murder in Paris of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish sixty-year-old woman thrown from her balcony.
The Jewish community had sharply criticized a 2019 court ruling that found Sarah Haimi’s killer unfit to stand trial.
The suspected killer, Kobili Traore, was a Muslim who shouted about Allah and called Halimi, his neighbor, a “demon” as he pummelled her to death in her apartment in 2017. Halimi’s daughter said that in 2015, Traore had called the daughter “dirty Jewess” in the building’s elevator.
A judge accepted the prosecution’s position that anti-Semitism motivated Traore to kill Halimi, but found him unfit to stand trial, citing a “psychotic episode” shortly before the incident that was deemed to be caused by smoking too much marijuana. The decision was upheld on appeal.