Paris court hands life sentence to murderer of French Holocaust survivor

PARIS (AFP) — A French court on Wednesday sentenced the killer of an elderly Jewish woman to life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole for 22 years, over the 2018 murder which caused an outcry over antisemitism in France.

Yacine Mihoub was convicted of the murder of Mireille Knoll, 85, who was stabbed 11 times and whose body was partly burned after her Paris apartment was set alight on March 23, 2018.

A second defendant, Alex Carrimbacus, was acquitted of murder by the Paris court, but found guilty of theft with anti-Semitic motives, for which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The court said that attack, which began as a robbery, was fueled by “a broader context of antisemitism” and “prejudices” about the purported wealth of Jewish people, which led Mihoub to believe the victim had “hidden treasures” in her home.

Knoll’s family hailed the verdict as “just.”

French President Emmanuel Macron attended the funeral of the octogenarian, who had survived a notorious 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris during World War II by fleeing with her mother to Portugal and who later married an Auschwitz survivor.

At the trial of the murder of Mireille Knoll, Yacine Mihoub (standing left) and Alex Carrimbacus (standing right) (Courtroom sketch: Benoit PEYRUCQ / AFP)

Mihoub, the son of one of Kroll’s neighbors who described her as being like a “surrogate grandmother” to him, denied any hand in her death, blaming Carrimbacus instead.

Participants walk behind banners holding placards during a silent march in Paris in memory of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Jewish woman murdered in her home in what police believe was an antisemitic attack, held on March 28, 2018. (Francois Guillot/AFP)

Knoll’s murder caused added repugnance because she was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and could not move unassisted.

Knoll’s son Daniel told the court that when his mother let Mihoub, who had done odd jobs for her for years, into her home “she never expected that the person she had protected for years would become her executioner.”

In his final statement to the court on Wednesday, Carrimbacus told Knoll’s family he regretted not preventing an attack described by the prosecution as “particularly savage.”

The attack was classified as antisemitic after Carrimbacus told investigators he overheard Mihoub arguing with Kroll on the day of her death “about Jews’ money and their wealth.”

He also claimed Mihoub, who had multiple convictions for violence, shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”) while stabbing her.

Prosecutors also pointed to messages glorifying jihadist attacks found in Mihoub’s prison cell as proof of his alleged antisemitism.

France’s 500,000-strong Jewish community, the biggest in Europe, has been rocked by a series of attacks in recent years by radical Islamists that have targeted Jews.

In March 2011, gunman Mohamed Merah shot dead a teacher and three children at Jewish school in the city of Toulouse in March 2011.

Four years later, four people were killed in a hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket in Paris by an accomplice of the two brothers who had massacred a group of cartoonists over Mohammed caricatures a few days earlier.

Two French security officers standing guard on January 10, 2015, the day after a terror attack on a kosher market in Paris. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

An estimated 30,000 people took part in a silent march in Knoll’s memory in March 2018 that was attended by government ministers and the heads of France’s political parties.

During the three-week murder trial the defendants, both repeat offenders who had become acquainted in prison, blamed each other for her death.

The case drew parallels with the killing in 2017 of an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties, Sarah Halimi, who was thrown out of the window of her Paris apartment by a neighbor shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest.”)

A woman holds up a sign during the day of rallies around the world protesting the French judicial system’s handling of the Sarah Halimi case, April 25, 2021. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images/ via JTA)

France’s highest court ruled in April that the killer in that case, Kobili Traore, was not criminally responsible after succumbing to a “delirious fit” under the influence of drugs and could not be put on trial.

That ruling infuriated the victim’s family as well as Jewish groups, and prompted Macron to urge a change in French law to ensure people face responsibility for violent crimes while under the influence of drugs.