President Emmanuel Macron urged a change in French law after a man who murdered a Jewish woman in 2017 avoided a trial on the grounds he acted in delirium due to drug-taking, in an interview published Monday, reports Yahoo! News.
Jewish groups have reacted with outrage to the decision by France’s highest court on Wednesday that Kobili Traoré was not criminally responsible for the murder in 2017 of Sarah Halimi.
Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman, died in 2017 after being pushed out of the window of her Paris flat by neighbour Traore, 27, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic).
Traoré, a heavy pot smoker, has been in psychiatric care since Halimi’s death and he remains there after the ruling.
The court said he committed the killing after succumbing to a “delirious fit” and was thus not responsible for his actions.
“Deciding to take narcotics and then ‘going mad’ should, not in my view, remove your criminal responsibility,” Macron told Le Figaro in an interview.