French Jew arrested for lying over Islamic State attack

MARSEILLE, France — A Jewish teacher in France who claimed he was attacked by Islamic State jihadists was taken into custody on Wednesday, accused of lying to police.

The man invited the press to his house in Marseille in southern France the day after the supposed attack in November, saying he had been beaten by three men claiming to represent the jihadist group.

But a police source confirmed on Wednesday that the man had been arrested for allegedly fabricating the story.

The man, named in earlier press accounts as Tzion Saadon, 56, was treated for light to moderate wounds after the supposed attack, and filed a police complaint on the way to the hospital.

At the time, prosecutor Brice Robin told reporters that one of the attackers was wearing a shirt with the Islamic State logo.

““The three people insulted, threatened and then stabbed their victim in the arm and leg. They were interrupted by the arrival of a car and fled,” Robin said.

Michele Teboul, the president of the local branch of the CRIF umbrella organization of French Jews, told JTA at the time that one of the attackers had shown Saadon a cellphone picture of Mohammed Merah, a french jihadist who killed a rabbi and four children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012.

Saadon’s claimed attack came days after Islamic State terrorists killed 130 people in a series of attacks, with France still on edge amid a manhunt for the killers and their accomplices.

He is not the only French teacher to be accused of lying about an IS attack. In January, a nursery school teacher was sent for psychiatric tests after admitting he lied about an attack in his classroom.

The 45-year-old man in Aubervilliers, northeast of Paris, initially said a man had burst into his classroom and cut him with a box cutter and scissors.

But he later admitted inventing the story and cutting himself on the neck and side.

There is no doubt over another attack in Marseille in January, when a teacher wearing a kippa, a Jewish skullcap, was set upon by a self-radicalized teenager — the latest in a series of anti-Semitic incidents in the port city.

The city’s top Jewish leader, Zvi Ammar, called on Jewish men and boys to stop wearing the kippa “until better days,” saying: “Unfortunately for us, we are targeted. As soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death.”