Ilan Halimi

Ilan Halimi
Ilan Halimi
Born	11 October 1982(1982-10-11)
Died	February 13, 2006(2006-02-13) Paris, France
Cause of death	Murdered by torture
Occupation	Salesman

Ilan Halimi (Hebrew: אילן חלימי‎) was a young French Jewish man (of Moroccan parentage)^[1] kidnapped on 21 January 2006 by a gang called "the Gang of Barbarians" (Gang des Barbares) and subsequently tortured, over a period of three weeks, resulting in his death. The murder was motivated by antisemitism and money.^[2]

A total of 27 people were accused as implicated in the crime and were tried for kidnapping and murder in 2009. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana (born 1980 in Paris to immigrants from Ivory Coast) was convicted to a life sentence, eligible for parole after 22 years (the maximum penalty under French law). Others received shorter prison sentences, some suspended, and three were acquitted. While Fofana's life sentence is definite, 14 of the 27 verdicts were appealed.^[3] The convictions were upheld on appeal in December 2010.^[4]

Contents 1 Timeline of the crime 2 The kidnappers and their associates 2.1 Assault on Mathieu Roumi 3 Motives 3.1 Attempted extortion 3.2 Antisemitism 3.3 Muslim fundamentalism 4 Public reaction 4.1 Criticism of police response 4.2 International reaction 5 Reburial in Israel 6 2009 trial 6.1 Incidents during the trial 6.2 Verdict and sentencing 7 2010 retrial 8 Books 9 References 10 External links 10.1 Media reports 10.1.1 In English 10.1.2 In French

Timeline of the crime

According to press reports based on information from French criminal investigation authorities, as of 25 February 2006 the crime is believed to have happened as follows:

• On 20 January, Halimi was lured by an attractive seventeen year old girl named Yalda,^[5] of French-Iranian origin,^[6] to an apartment block in the Parisian banlieues.^[7]
• There Halimi was overwhelmed by a youth gang and kept prisoner for twenty-four days.
• Halimi was initially guarded by four teenagers who were promised €5,000. During the three-week period, his kidnappers, at least 19 of them, tortured him by beating him all over his body, especially his testicles, completely wrapping his head in duct tape, except for his mouth, so he could breathe and eat through a straw, stabbing him, burning his body and face with lighters and cigarettes, sodomizing him with broom sticks and breaking his fingers in order to extract a ransom of initially 450,000 Euros from his family. They urinated on him, kept him naked, scratched him, cut him with knives, and finally poured gasoline on him and set him on fire. Reportedly, neighbors came by to watch and to even participate in the torture but no one called the authorities.^[8]
• Halimi was found naked, handcuffed, and bound with nylon rope to a tree about 40 yards inside a woodlot from a railway outside Paris, on February 13. A list of cases of the 'bystander effect' reported that more than 80% of his body had been burned with acid, as well as gasoline (possibly to destroy evidence of his captors' DNA), to the point that he was difficult to recognize. He had severe contusions, blood blisters, and hematomas covering most of his body, to the point that he was more blue than flesh-colored, multiple broken bones, one ear and one big toe missing, and his testicles looked like “blackened oranges.”^[9] Halimi died en route to a hospital.
• In the subsequent days, French police arrested 21 persons in connection with the crime, including the woman used as bait. The leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana, fled to his parents' homeland of Ivory Coast, where he was arrested on 23 February. Fofana was extradited back to France on 4 March 2006.

The kidnappers and their associates

Implicated in the crime are the members of a youth gang calling themselves "les barbares" (the Barbarians).^[10] The people so far arrested are mostly unemployed children of immigrants from African countries. In total, 27 individuals were under investigation and were subsequently put on trial. Currently, 19 of those individuals have been convicted and imprisoned. These include:

Youssouf Fofana

Youssouf Fofana (25; b. 2 August 1980), the self-proclaimed "Brain of the Barbarians". He was born in Paris to immigrants from Ivory Coast and served three to four years in prison for various crimes including armed robbery and resisting arrest.^[11] In an interview he denied killing Halimi, but showed no sign of remorse for his extreme cynicism.^[12]

Christophe Martin-Vallet

Christophe M-V, aka "Moko", a 22-year-old Martinique French man, specializing in computers. He appears to have masterminded the kidnappings and to have been the lieutenant of Fofana.^[13] He was monitoring the honeypot activities of the girls.^[14]

Sorour Arbabzadeh

Sorour Arbabzadeh aka "Yalda" (or "Emma"), a seventeen-year-old French-Iranian girl who acted as a honeypot to lure Halimi into the gang's lair.^[5]

Jean-Christophe Gavarin

Jean-Christophe Gavarin, aka "Zigo", aka "JC" aged 17, one of the individuals who tortured Ilan.^[13]

Gilles Serrurier

"The concierge,"^[15] Gilles Serrurier^[16] (39; b. 1967), of the banlieu to which Halimi was taken, who lent his attackers the apartment and cellar in which they tortured and killed him.^[13]

Assault on Mathieu Roumi

On February 22, 2008, six members of the "Barbarians" assaulted 19-year-old Mathieu Roumi in the same Paris suburb of Bagneux where Halimi was killed. For two hours the attackers tortured the young man. One shoved cigarette butts into his mouth, another took issue with Roumi's Jewish origin (paternal), grabbed correction fluid and scrawled "dirty Jew" and an anti-gay insult on his forehead. When the issue of his sexual orientation arose, one of them placed a condom on the tip of a stick and shoved it in Roumi's mouth. The six men proceeded to scream at him and threaten that he would die the way Halimi did. [6][7][8]

Motives

The kidnapping seems to be motivated by a combination of anti-semitism and a desire for money.

Police have attributed to the banlieues' gang subculture a "poisonous mentality that designates Jews as enemies along with other 'outsiders,'" such as Americans, mainstream French, and Europeans in general. "If they could have gotten their hands on a (non-Jewish) French cop in the same way, they probably would have done the same thing," a retired police chief opined.^[7]

Attempted extortion

The kidnappers originally thought Halimi was wealthy because he came from a Moroccan Jewish family, though he came from the same poor and working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris as the kidnappers did.^[17]

• The kidnappers demanded ransom, initially EUR 450,000; this then dropped to EUR 5,000.
• The French police initially believed that anti-Semitism was not a factor in the crime.^[18]
• As the investigation progresses, this gang appears to have been implicated in at least 15 other cases of racketeering.^[19] Posing as members of the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica or member of the French division of the PFLP, they threatened several high ranking CEOs including Jérôme Clément, président of the European TV operator Arte, Rony Brauman, former president and co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, and the CEO as well as another high-ranking member of a large company selling home appliances. They sent threatening pictures of an unknown man dressed as a middle-eastern Arab in front of a picture of Osama Bin Laden. In another case, the owner of a large grocery store was directed to pay 100,000 euros.

Antisemitism

• According to then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, members of the gang confessed that they believed all Jews to be rich and it motivated them to target several Jews,^[20] culminating with Halimi.^[18] This starkly contrasts with the reality of the Halimi family's working-class circumstances; they and many other poor and working-class Jews inhabited the same lower-class banlieue as the attackers.^[21][22]
• The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin declared that the "odious crime"^[23] was antisemitic, and that antisemitism is not acceptable in France.^[24]

Muslim fundamentalism

Halimi's uncle Rafi told reporters that some of the telephone calls to the victim's family involved recitations from the Qur'an accompanied by Halimi's tortured screams.^[24] The French-Arab and African-Muslim ringleaders recited verses from the Koran in their communications with the family,^[25] while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background.^[26] It also appeared the gang had an interest in Palestinian group Hamas, as its propaganda material was found by the kidnappers.^[27]

Public reaction

The case has found an enormous echo in the French media and in the French public. Six French associations called for a mass demonstration against racism and antisemitism in Paris on Sunday, 26 February. Between 33,000 (as estimated by police) and 80,000 to 200,000 (as estimated by the organizers) people participated in Paris, as well as thousands around the country. Also present were public figures such as Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean-Marie Lustiger and Lionel Jospin. Right-wing politician Philippe de Villiers was booed by far-left militants and had to leave under police guard.^[28]

Criticism of police response

Ruth Halimi, Ilan's mother, subsequently co-authored a book with Emilie Freche entitled “24 Days” that was released in April 2009. In the book, Ruth claimed that French police never suspected her son's kidnappers would kill the 23-year-old after three weeks in captivity in 2006, partly because they would not face the anti-Semitic character of the crime, the French daily Le Figaro reported. In an interview with Le Figaro, Emilie Freche stated that “by denying the anti-Semitic character, [police] did not figure out the profile of the gang.” The book details how Ilan's parents were told to stay silent during the ordeal and were ordered not to seek aid in order to pay the ransom, nor show their son's photo to people who might have come forward with information about his whereabouts.^[29]

In an interview with Elle Magazine on March 27, 2009, Ruth wrote that “The police were completely off the mark. They thought they were dealing with classic bandits, but these people were beyond the norm.” Halimi stated that she wrote the book to “alert public opinion to the danger of anti-Semitism which has returned in other forms, so that a story like this can never happen again.”^[29]

International reaction

The event caused an international outcry.^[30]

On May 9, the Helsinki Commission held a briefing titled "Tools for Combating Anti-Semitism: Police Training and Holocaust Education" chaired by Commission Co-Chairman Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) who said: "His tragedy made brutally clear that Jews are still attacked because they are Jews, and that our work to eradicate all forms of anti-Semitism in all its ugly forms and manifestations is far from done."^[31]

Reburial in Israel

At the request of the family, the remains of Ilan Halimi were reburied in Har HaMenuchot cemetery^[32] Israel on Friday, Feb. 9, 2007. ^[33]

It was timed to allow his first Yartzeit, on Tu Bishvat, to pass before the reburial.^[34] The date and time (11:30am) also marked "exactly one year after his burial in France according to the Jewish Calendar."^[35]

In May 2011, a garden in the XIIème arrondissement of Paris was renamed after him.^[36] Ilan used to play in this garden as a child.^[37]

2009 trial

The trial began Wednesday, 29 April 2009.^[38][39]

Notwithstanding requests for an open public trial by many, including Halimi's mother^[40] and the family of key suspect Youssouf Fofana,^[41] the trial was held behind closed doors.^[38]

The judge defended his exclusion of the public and the media^[42] by saying that two of the 27 suspects were juveniles at the time of the crime.^[43] French law does not require open trials for juveniles.^[44]

Incidents during the trial

Fofana claimed in court that he had friends who would "take pictures to identify people." Francis Szpiner, lawyer for the Halimi family, believed that Fofana was alluding to the jurors, and was implying that he was going to put a price on their heads.^[45]

When the judge refused to quiet Fofana, the Halimi family and their lawyer (who previously said "It was the law of silence that killed Ilan Halimi and it has imposed itself again" regarding the decision to bar journalists from the trial^[46]) left the courtroom.^[45]

A report dated approximately halfway into the trial's projected 10 weeks was headlined "Court tosses defendant in Halimi trial after he hurls shoes" and it noted that "reports about the trial are communicated through intermediaries who have access to the trial."^[47] Other reports indicated that, as a result of this incident, the judge suspended the trial.^[48] Subsequent reports dated about 2 weeks later indicated that the prosecution's counsel, Philippe Bilger, recommended life in prison for ring-leader Youssouf Fofana, 20 years for Fofana's two closest associates, and 12 years for the woman who lured Halimi to his death.^[49]

Verdict and sentencing

On Friday,^[50] 10 July 2009, Fofana was sentenced to life, with minimum of 22 years of imprisonment. Under French law, he is eligible for parole after 22 years.^[51]

Murder victim Ilan Halimi's mother and other Sabbath observers were "absent from the court Friday night because of the Sabbath."^[52][53][54]

Sentences for the others varied, while verdicts for suspects who were minors at the time of the crime were not publicly disclosed.^[55] Samir Aït Abdelmalek, 30, and Jean-Christophe Soumbou, 23, the two main accomplices, were sentenced to 18 and 15 years.^[56]

Also sentenced to 15 years was a third defendant, who was a minor at the time of the kidnap/murder.

Sorour Arbabzadeh aka "Yalda"^[57] or "Emma", a then-17 year old French-Iranian girl who acted as a honeypot to lure Halimi into the gang's lair, was sentenced to 9 years.^[58]

The verdict of this trial included acquittals for two of those on trial^[59] and one or more suspended sentences.^[60]

2010 retrial

The sentences issued after the first trial were criticized as too lenient, and the attorney general, upon the instigation of Minister of Justice Michèle Alliot-Marie, announced an appeal of 14 out of the 27 verdicts, including those of the two main co-defendants, Samir Aït Abdelmalek (15 years, prosecution asked for 20 years) and Jean Christophe Soumbou (18 years, prosecution asked for 20 years).^[61]

Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, France's main Jewish organization, said that a law may soon be available that would preclude closed-door trials in this type of case.^[32] "Perhaps in a year's time there will be a new trial, and perhaps it will be public." A Halimi relative said: "The important thing for me is not handing out heavier jail terms, honestly. The important thing is to open this to the press and public and make it a learning experience."

The retrial was officially announced Monday 10 July 2009. It started on 25 October 2010 and ended on December 17, 2010, with all convictions upheld and time added to some sentences.^[62]

Books

• 24 Days: The Truth about the death of Ilan Halimi, by his mother, Mrs. Ruth Halimi (co-authored by Emily Frêche)
• If This Is A Jew: Reflections on the Death of Ilan Halimi, by Adrien Barrot, Jan. 2007, ISBN 978-2841863648

References

External links

Media reports

In English

• The barbarians of Europe: The brutal murder of Ilan Halimi, By Tom Gross, The Jerusalem Post, 28 February 2006
• Killing in France Seen as 'Wake-Up Call', The Washington Post, 25 February 2006
• Anti-Semitism seen rising among France's Muslims, The Boston Globe, 13 March 2006
• Trial opens into alleged gang kidnap, torture and murder of French Jew, The Guardian, 29 April 2009
• Kline, Brett (March 22, 2006). "Mother of murdered French Jew speaks out on what went wrong" (free registration required). Around the Jewish World. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Archived from the original on 2007-03-23. http://web.archive.org/web/20070323185303/http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20060322MotherofmurderedF.html. Retrieved 2007-09-03. 
• Torture-slaying raises fear of anti-Semitic resurgence, San Francisco Chronicle, 26 February 2006

In French

• Les événements heure par heure, timeline of events from Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 February 2006
• Itinéraires d'une bande meurtrière, Libération, 22 February 2006

Persondata
Name	Halimi, Ilan
Alternative names
Short description	Murdered French Jew
Date of birth	1982
Place of birth
Date of death	February 13, 2006
Place of death	Paris, France