The Paris prosecutor’s office is investigating whether anti-Semitism was a motivation for the killing of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor that has outraged France’s Jewish community, reports The Washington Post.
Mireille Knoll was stabbed 11 times and left in her burning Paris apartment Friday, French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux announced Monday afternoon on Twitter.
Authorities have taken two suspects into custody, according to a judicial official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the case and would tell The Washington Post only that one of the suspects was born in 1989.
Jewish advocacy groups were quick to put the case within the context of rising anti-Semitism in France and to point out the similarities to another high-profile case being investigated as anti-Semitic: the April 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jewish physician and kindergarten teacher who was beaten in her apartment and then thrown out a window. Authorities suspect a Muslim neighbor.
“This was the same Paris arrondissement, several streets apart,” said Noémie Halioua, a French journalist with Actualité Juive and the author of a new book on the Halimi case. “And both victims were elderly women who lived alone and who had both previously complained of threats.”
Knoll and Halimi lived in the 11th arrondissement (or district) on the eastern side of Paris, an area that has traditionally been home to immigrant populations but in recent years has seen large-scale gentrification.
“There is also the barbarity of the crimes and the fact that in both cases the victims were fragile women,” Halioua said.