French investigators headed to Côte d’Ivoire on Tuesday to hunt the leader of a gang that tortured and murdered a young Jewish man near Paris, a crime thought to have been motivated in part by anti-Semitism.
Two officers were expected in Abidjan late in the day to track down the gang’s alleged leader, a 25-year-old convicted petty criminal of Ivorian origin. He styles himself — in English — as the ”brain of barbarians” and is believed to have fled to the West African country last week.
President Jacques Chirac telephoned the parents of the victim, 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, on Tuesday. He pledged ”full light” would be shed on the case to determine if anti-Semitism was behind the crime, according to a spokesperson.
Meanwhile Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that four of the six other people targeted unsuccessfully by the gang were Jewish, reinforcing suspicions of a possible anti-Semitic motive.
”These thugs had mainly sordid, criminal motives — money. But they were convinced that — quote, unquote — ‘Jews have money’ and that even if those they kidnapped did not, the community would rally round,” he said.
The kidnapping and murder of the young Halimi, who was tortured for weeks in a suburban flat and left to die in the street, sparked an uproar among the French Jewish community.
Halimi’s mother Ruth told Agence France-Presse her son ”would not have been
chosen if he had not been Jewish” and called for the governmnent to make examples of those responsible.
”For such barbarity to exist in France in 2006 is impossible and cannot be accepted,” she said.
French officials believe the gang’s main aim was extortion but said on Monday that anti-Semitism also appeared to have played a part.
According to a judicial official, at least one suspect said Halimi was targeted because ”Jews have money and they are a close-knit community”, while another said he was burned on the face with a cigarette because of his religion.
Ten people have been placed under investigation over the murder, of whom six could could face aggravated charges of being motivated by religious hatred.
Police announced three more arrests in southern France on Tuesday.
Several thousand people demonstrated in Paris on Sunday to demand justice and the French Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF) has called for a second day of nationwide protests during the coming weekend.
France’s chief rabbi, Joseph Sitruk, cut short a visit to Israel to chair a meeting of Jewish leaders in Paris on Tuesday evening.
Halimi went missing in late January after agreeing to a date with an unknown woman who approached him at his workplace, a telephone shop in central Paris.
Cellphone text messages and e-mails showing pictures of Halimi, bound and blindfolded, were sent to his family along with demands for a €400 000 ransom.
Investigators traced the crime to a gang on a housing estate in the southern suburbs of Paris, after a young woman who served as a lure in several botched kidnappings turned herself in and led them to the others.
She has been detained and faces charges of failure to report a crime.
Sarkozy said that pro-Palestinian and Salafist Islamist documents were found during house searches by investigators but warned against drawing any hasty conclusions concerning the group’s motives.
But the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in a letter to Sarkozy, said it was clear ”that their motive was Islamist anti-Semitism” and called for France to prevent ”Jihadist violence, hatred and anti-Semitism from taking root in France”.
Halimi’s mother, in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, accused police of downplaying a possible anti-Semitic motive to avoid alienating France’s five-million strong Muslim community. – Sapa-AFP