France sees racist motive in brutal torture death

France sees racist motive in brutal torture death

By Thierry Leveque and Tom Heneghan Mon Feb 20, 6:02 PM ET



PARIS (Reuters) - A young Jewish man who died after being kidnapped and tortured for weeks may have fallen victim to a racist attack, French leaders said on Monday, vowing to catch and punish those responsible for an "unspeakable barbarity."

France has been shocked by the murder of Ilan Halimi, 23, a mobile telephone salesman killed after being held captive for three weeks, and Jewish community leader Roger Cukierman urged the government to "provide the whole truth" about the case.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told Jewish community leaders at their annual dinner that the judge handling the case was investigating leads pointing to an anti-Semitic attack, and said he had ordered his interior and justice ministers to shed all possible light on the affair.

Investigating magistrate Corinne Goetzmann placed seven suspects under formal investigation on Monday for kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, criminal association and "murder linked to the victim's religion."

Their victim Halimi, was found on February 13 lying in agony by a railway line outside Paris, with stab wounds and burns over much of his body. He died on the way to hospital.

Police said a gang led by a man calling himself "brain of the barbarians" used a young woman to lure Halimi into a trap and then detained and tortured him while demanding a ransom.

The gang, whose members are thought to be aged between 17 and 32, are suspected of involvement in six other kidnappings since the end of last year.

They contacted Halimi's family via the Internet, text messages and by telephone, demanding a ransom of 450,000 euros ($537,300). The family was unable to raise the funds.

ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACK?

Until now, police have publicly denied any anti-Semitic link, saying the gang led by an Ivory Coast immigrant with a Muslim name had also attacked non-Jews. But about 1,200 people, mostly Jews, marched in Paris on Sunday to protest against the killing.

"Was Ilan Halimi killed because he was Jewish?" Cukierman, head of the Council of French Jewish Institutions, asked at the dinner attended by Villepin and several ministers.

"Mr Prime Minister, you owe it to our country to tell the truth," he said.
"I ask your government to provide us with the whole truth and nothing but the truth about this affair, and especially about the motivations of the killers," he said.

"We will do everything possible so those who committed this barbarous crime are arrested and brought to justice," Villepin replied.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose police services have until now been reluctant to class the killing a hate crime, condemned the murder as "an act of unspeakable barbarity."

Justice Minister Pascal Clement told the same dinner one suspect had indicated Halimi was selected "because he was Jewish and because a Jew was rich. That is an aggravating circumstance, it means that the resonance is no longer the same."

France's 600,000-strong Jewish community, Europe's largest, came under rising anti-Semitic attacks earlier this decade, often from disaffected Muslim youths protesting against Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.

Ilan's uncle Rafi Halimi was quoted in the Israeli press as saying the family thought the killing was anti-Semitic and claiming the kidnappers had tried to capture two other Jews.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060220/..._kidnappers_dc

If you dig around you can find a lot more details to this story. Yes, it was a Muslim gang, yes, the koran was involved, yes it was an anti-Semitic doing, and yes, it is horrible. They tortured this guy to death. For 3 fucking weeks!

All is not well in France

Horrific murder of Jewish man in Paris shows anti-Semitism alive and well
Clara Beyler

French anti-Semitism reached its gloomiest peak these last few days.


The murder of Ilan Halimi, despite its resemblance to Daniel Pearl’s story, who was murdered because he was a Jew, did not take place in Pakistan nor in any other Muslim-majority country.

It did not happen in the Middle East, or South America where Colombia holds a record in ransom kidnappings. It took place in the heart of the French capital, and the horrendous crime was organized by a group of French nationals, mostly of African and Arab origin.

Brutal Killing

Halimi murder suspect detained / Ynet Leader of gang behind brutal killing of French Jew arrested in Ivory Coast, handed over to French investigators Full Story

Yet the French government and media are trying to cover up the reality of Muslim anti-Semitism, and this in the face of the most gruesome anti-Semitic murder of the decade.

A group of criminals calling themselves “the gang of the Barbarians” kidnapped on January 21st a 23-year-old Jewish man, Ilan Halimi who worked selling cell phones in Paris. The gang, headed by a 25-year-old man, born in France to a family hailing from the Ivory Coast, called Halimi's Parents demanding ransom.

The gang of criminals selected Ilan because he was Jewish; as some of the arrested suspects declared: “Jews are wealthy,” and that is why they picked him. A suspected member of the group revealed that one of them burned Ilan's forehead with a cigarette simply because he was Jewish.

An arduous effort was made by French authorities - police and the public prosecutor- to downplay and minimize the victim's religious, conscientiously trying to label the crime as a minor news item. However, the examining magistrate decided that the fact Ilan was Jewish was indeed a major component in the case.

Minister of Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking for the first time on the topic last Tuesday, declared that the crime was anti-Semitic. Sarkozy added that the gang was first motivated by greed and by “anti-Semitism by conflation."

The “Barbarians” asked for 450,000 euros – about USD 540,000. They told Ilan's parents on the phone that if they could not pay, they should ask the Jewish community for help, playing on the notion of Jewish solidarity, to raise the money needed to set the young man free.

The gang contacted the family by phone and e-mails and sent a picture of their captive held at gunpoint, with blindfolded eyes, imitating Iraqi jihadists’ actions.

For three weeks, the “Barbarians” detained and tortured Ilan Halimi. When he was found on February 13, he was naked, handcuffed after being dumped near railway tracks in a Parisian suburb. He suffered from severe burns covering 80 percent of his body. Traces of cigarette burns, iron burns, and various cuts (made by knives and scissors) covered his body. He passed away in an ambulance before reaching the hospital.

Police arrested about a dozen suspects so far. The gang leader’s was finally arrested in the Ivory Coast where he went into hiding two days after Ilan’s death. The "baits" used to trap Ilan, three women, are also among the suspects.

However, there must have been many witnesses to the crime, which spread over weeks. The shrieks and screams brought on by torture must have been heard by some of those living in the building where the horrific scenes were taking place. Yet not one soul, not even one anonymous caller, alerted the police in the suburb of Bagneux.

The janitor, who lent the gang the empty lodging without notifying the owner, is among the suspects in the ongoing investigation, which everyday seems to reveal a little more of the horror of what took place in the sordid apartment. According to an unofficial source, police came to realize that many in the building knew what was going on, but did not act since it appears everyone knew the victim was Jewish.


The items found in the torture chamber included extremist Islamic literature and leaflets of a pro-Palestinian charity blacklisted by the United States and Israel. The charity, the Comité de Bienfaisance et de Soutien aux Palestiniens (CBSP), a Hamas-affiliated fund, is still active in France despite the exposure of its members and financial support tying it directly to terrorist activities in the Palestinian Authority.


What happened to Ilan is not the first attempt of this kind. The gang tried to pull off similar crimes before with four of the six previous victims being Jewish. Similar stories are only now surfacing.


French daily newspaper Le Parisien reported that the gang's last victim was a fifty-year-old Jewish man, who had driven home a girl who attempted to seduce his twenty-year-old son. The man was miraculously saved from being further beaten and certainly kidnapped when passersby called the police. Meanwhile, young Halimi’s seductress has turned herself in.


Yet police officials and the media do not tell the whole story: Various attempts have taken place in the past, and other gangs are reported to operate in similar fashion, luring their Jewish victims with an attractive girl who brings the "target" to the gang.


There appears to be a tacit agreement between the media and police to downplay these attempts and the role of these young men from the suburbs, already “suffering” from bad publicity due to the riots of last November. In those riots, hundreds of cars were set aflame and violent clashes between police and young thugs took place.


Also, the Muhammad cartoons’ controversy is too fresh in many minds and further polemics involving the Muslim and Arab communities seem to be avoided by officials.


And so, despite recent reports about a sharp decrease in anti-Semitic incidents across France, the horrific murder of Ilan Halimi reminds us the monster is still there.

Clara Beyler is a French-born counter-terrorism researcher

(02.24.06, 10:28)
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...220564,00.html

Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Where is the outrage? Torture murder by Muslim gang with community complicity in Paris goes unreported in US media
Where is the outrage? Torture murder by Muslim gang with community complicity in Paris goes unreported in US media

February 27, 2006

February 27, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews - The Halimi cover-up continues - in the face of 100,000 Parisian protesters on Sunday - finding the media guilty of attempting to manipulate the story.
Most U.S. newspapers buried the death of Mr. Halimi if they carried it at all. Now they are attempting to defuse it, acting as multicultural ombudsmen for the Islamists who perpetrated this outrage.

Note to the liars at the Associated Press, money was not the object of this kidnapping, the motivating force is exactly the same as what drove Hitler - AP can't handle the truth, neither can the LA Times whose Sunday piece concluded:

"Rather than a premeditated anti-Semitic murder, it seems a more complex result of dysfunction in the narrow world of thug culture: a poisonous mentality that designates Jews as enemies along with other "outsiders," according to investigators and other observers."

The only reason Mr. Halimi was selected was because he was a Jew.
The leader of the gang - "The Barbarians" - Youssouf Fofana was born in France and attended college there. He is not the stereotype that the liberal press wants you to believe, a down-and-out North African immigrant with no future stuck in a seething French Muslim ghetto and ignorant of Western ways.
Youssouf was also a well-known Islamist. Acquaintances referred to him as a "devout Muslim" who often lectured others in a manner they characterized as "preaching." Fofana subscribed to the blood-libel myths associated with anti-Semitism including the belief that all Jews are rich.
Would AP and the LA Times be expending such efforts to parse, shuffle and dissemble if the victim had been a Muslim killed by Christians or an African American lynched by a Southern gang?
When the truth is inconsistent with the predisposition of the MSM they lie - they did this with the French Muslim riots in November, they did so only a few weeks ago refusing to lay out how relatively benign cartoons about Mohammed were manipulated into tinder for Muslim fury and that is what now is happening when they tell you that the grisly torture death of Ilan Halimi was not the result of Islamist hate.

One must truly wonder over the Bizaro-world that American journalism has become when the correct analysis on Halimi comes from the likes of the French Communist newspaper, "Liberation" as translated here by Beila Rabinowitz:

"The whole nature of this affair - the combination of gangland criminality with exceptional sadism and a brute anti-Semitic instinct that equates Jews and money - gives it an extraordinary character that inspires both revulsion and dread."

The mind reels...

http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1690