Man charged with making threats against French Jewish school, site of 2012 shooting

Authorities place 34-year-old under judicial supervision after he made 163 threatening phone calls in a month, including to Toulouse Jewish school, hospital and a Marseille surgeon

This file photo taken on March 19, 2012, in Toulouse, France, shows policemen marking the area in front of the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school where jihadist Mohammed Merah killed three children and a teacher. (AFP/Eric Cabanis)
This file photo taken on March 19, 2012, in Toulouse, France, shows policemen marking the area in front of the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school where jihadist Mohammed Merah killed three children and a teacher. (AFP/Eric Cabanis)

French authorities have placed a man under judicial supervision after he allegedly made threatening phone calls last month to a Jewish school in Toulouse that was the site of a deadly terror attack in 2012.

The 34-year-old suspect made 163 phone calls in total, reports showed, including some to a hospital and to a Marseille surgeon.

“I fear that he could attack the Jewish community,” a public prosecutor told The Times of Israel’s French edition.

In March 2012, an Islamist gunman entered the Ozar Hatorah school and shot dead a rabbi and three young students, wounding four others. He was killed after a 30-hour standoff with police.

The attack was often cited as one of the manifestations of a rise in antisemitism in France that drove a surge in French-Jewish immigration to Israel throughout the 2010s.

In 2019, the shooter’s brother was sentenced to 30 years in prison as an accomplice in the attack.

The defendant who made the phone calls throughout January, and whose identity has not been publicly revealed, was described as without a permanent home and staying in hotels.

Last week, a court in Castres ordered a psychiatric assessment and put him under supervision in his mother’s house in the town of Mazamet, in southern France, and they adjourned his case until March.

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