1Tale of Torture and Murder Horrifies the Whole of France

[Grimmy]

http://www.nysun.com/article/27948?page_no=1Tale of Torture and Murder Horrifies the Whole of France

By MICHEL GURFINKIEL - Special to the Sun
February 22, 2006

The brutal abduction and murder in Paris of a young Jewish man by a gang of African immigrants called the Barbarians has shocked the whole of France, which once again has been obliged to face its anti-Semitic past.

The murder of a 23-year-old cell-phone salesman, Ilan Halimi, took place over three weeks, during which he was tortured while his captors tried to extract a ransom from his family.

Halimi was lured to his death by a woman he had met in his telephone store. They met up late on the night of January 20 in one of Paris's southern suburbs, Bagneux, on what he thought was a date.

The next day, his parents received an e-mail telling them their son had been abducted and would be released on payment of about $540,000. In order to convince Halimi's parents their son had been kidnapped, the abductors borrowed a trick from Islamist kidnappers who abduct Westerners in the Middle East: They sent a picture of the young man being threatened by a gun and holding a newspaper to prove the date and time.

More e-mail demands and pictures of Halimi were sent to his parents in subsequent days. The family reported the kidnapping to the Parisian police, who advised them to begin bargaining with their son's captors. At one time the abductors agreed to lower their ransom to about $120,000, then even dropped their demand to $60,000.

According to a police source, "This behavior was very different from what is usually expected from abductors motivated by greed."

Both the judge in charge of the investigation, Corinne Goetzmann, and the French attorney general, Pascal Clement, said that a principal motive of Halimi's attackers was anti-Semitism. Under French law, racial or religious prejudice or hatred is an aggravating circumstance in a trial for murder.

[Continued from page 1 of 3]

On February 11, four days after the abductors stopped communicating with the family, Halimi was found, still alive, not far from a railway line at Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, about 15 kilometers south of Bagneux.

He was naked, handcuffed, and bleeding profusely. He was incapable of speaking. His entire body - or "80% of it," according to police - had been butchered. He died of his wounds on the way to the hospital, just a few minutes after he was discovered.

The Jewish community in Paris was outraged. More than 1,000 attended his funeral at the Jewish cemetery at Pantin, in Paris's eastern suburbs, and last weekend they marched to protest at the futility of the murder.

The police released a photo-fit picture of a young woman who had acted as bait in other similar kidnappings cases. The woman, identified by police simply as "Audrey L." Her close friends, who recognized her from the police picture, persuaded her to surrender. She turned herself in to police on February 17.

"Audrey L. said that Halimi's abduction - in which she claims not to have been involved - was conceived and perpetrated by "the Barbarians," a gang of African and North African immigrants which has perpetrated similar abductions in the past.

Within a matter of hours, 15 members of the gang were under arrest. But the police were too late to catch the gang's leader, Youssouf Fofana, 26, who, along with the individual described as the "Maghrebine girl," whom he'd met in the phone store, had already fled France for the safety of the Ivory Coast.

More details emerged after the arrests. Halimi had been held in several different places in and around Bagneux, whose residents, most of them immigrants, did not appear to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Such densely populated immigrant areas are considered "no-go areas" ("zones de non droit") where the police cannot operate freely.

[Continued from page 2 of 3]

The Barbarians are not a homogeneous gang. Some members, like Mr. Fofana, are diehard criminals who have been involved in armed robberies. Others were used for menial tasks.

At the heart of the gang was an inner circle of Muslim-African criminals.The lesser partners were Muslim Maghrebines or Christian whites. Many were unemployed and barely educated. Some were still at high school; others at college.

According to her lawyer, Audrey L., a retirement home nurse, has been involved in several "honeypot" operations before but had never quite realized what they were all about. All in all, seven members (six men and one woman) of the gang have been charged with criminal offenses.

The French attorney general believes Halimi was targeted "because he was Jewish and thus, as a Jew, presumed to be rich." One teenage gang member admitted having put out a cigarette on Halimi's face "because he didn't like Jews."

It seems, however, that the Barbarians' anti-Semitism went much further. Mr. Fofana and other core gang members may have been close to a local mosque. According to one witness, verses from the Koran were recited while Halimi was tortured.

There are precedents of Islamist terrorists luring young non-Muslims to their deaths, often over the Internet offering the prospect of sex or romance. A few years ago an Israeli teenager near Ramallah, Israel, was murdered after falling for such a ruse.

Last Monday, the Halimi murder was the main topic of debate at the annual dinner of the Representative Council of the Jewish Organizations of France. The council's chairman, Rogier Cukierman, urged Prime Minister Villepin, the guest speaker, to help discover the whole truth behind the young man's vicious murder.

"Did Ilan die because he was Jewish?" Mr. Cukierman asked. Mr. Villepin promised to find out. "We owe you the truth. Indeed we owe it to the entire French nation," he said.

[ClutterbusterNY]

These are the same characters who set the southern suburbs of Paris on fire right before Christmas. While this is horrible and very sad, it is interesting to note that the victim was of Moroccan ancestry :http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/684686.html
The woman used as the bait, described as the "Maghrebine girl," whom he'd met in the phone store, evidently was Moroccan as well. Maghrebe is Arabic for Moroccan. It seems that Ilan's family lived in France for 25 years and must have felt close ties to the Moroccan ex-pat community and comfortable in that area to have continued to stay in that neighborhood.

[SGRock]

Originally Posted by Grimmy

. The family reported the kidnapping to the Parisian police, who advised them to begin bargaining with their son's captors. At one time the abductors agreed to lower their ransom to about $120,000, then even dropped their demand to $60,000.

Was this the "Keystone Cops" they went to for help. Another reason to hate the French.