French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a change in the country’s law after the top court ruled not to prosecute the killer of a Jewish woman because he was on cannabis at the time of the crime, according to local media.
France24 reported:
President Emmanuel Macron urged a change in French law after a man who murdered a Jewish woman in 2017 avoided a trial on the grounds he acted in delirium due to drug-taking, in an interview published Monday.
Jewish groups have reacted with outrage to the decision by France’s highest court on Wednesday that Kobili Traore was not criminally responsible for the murder in 2017 of Sarah Halimi.
Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman, died in 2017 after being pushed out of the window of her Paris flat by neighbour Traore, 27, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic).
Traore, a heavy pot smoker, has been in psychiatric care since Halimi’s death and he remains there after the ruling.
The court said he committed the killing after succumbing to a “delirious fit” and was thus not responsible for his actions.
“Deciding to take narcotics and then ‘going mad’ should, not in my view, remove your criminal responsibility,” Macron told Le Figaro in an interview.
“I would like Justice Minister (Eric Dupond-Moretti) to present a change in the law as soon as possible”, he added.
Macron’s remarks come after repeated pleas from the Jewish leaders. “Macron’s comments followed outrage in the French Jewish community over the court’s ruling and statements by Jewish leaders,” as they demand better legal protection, the Jerusalem Post reported.
While the French court was preoccupied with the killer’s drug use, it failed to take his jihadist ideology or his antisemitic motives into account.
“Traoré yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and recited a number of verses in the Koran before throwing her over the balcony of Belleville apartment, located in the east of Paris,” Israeli TV channel i24News noted, citing a French police report.
“If the killer’s mental state at the time of the crime exacerbated his antisemitism — as all reports seem to indicate — why refuse to see that there was antisemitism indeed prior to the use of drugs?” French philanthropist Francis Kalifat asked in an op-ed in the weekly Algemeiner on Monday.
The murder of Sarah Halimi is not an isolated incident. With the surge in Islamist terror attacks in France in recent years, French Jews have increasingly come into the cross-hairs of the jihadis. In 2012, an Algerian migrant with affiliation to Al Qaeda gunned down three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. A Jewish Supermarket was targeted by ISIS terrorists in January 2015, killing four shoppers.
In March 2018, 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was stabbed to death in her Parisian apartment. One of the killers apparently yelled “Allahu Akbar” as they stabbed the Jewish Holocaust survivor eleven times before setting her on fire, the London Times reported.
Victim’s brother reacts to French court ruling
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