25 January 2007
Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Jewish man whose atrocious murder last year shocked France, is to be buried in Jerusalem. Halimi was kidnapped in January last year and then tortured for three weeks before being left to die. His body will be flown to Israel on 8 February. Meanwhile, the French Jewish community will offer a Torah scroll in memory of Halimi during a ceremony next Sunday in the Saint-Lazare synagogue in Paris, in the presence of politicians, leaders of the community and his family. The Torah scroll will be sent to the Western Wall in Jerusalem two days after his burial. In another memorial, a forest will be planted in his name in Israel.
Halimi, a cellular phone salesman, went missing on 21 January 2006 after apparently having been lured into a sex-trap by a young woman who came to the shop where he worked in centre of Paris. He was held and tortured for three weeks in an apartment estate in Bagneux, a poor multi-ethnic suburb, by a gang that sent ransom demands to Ilan’s family. Halimi died shortly after being found critically wounded, naked and hand-cuffed along a railway track in the suburb of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, 20 miles south of Paris. A group who called themselves the “Gang of the Barbarous” claimed responsibility for the murder. The gang’s head, Youssouf Fofana, a 25-year-old French of Ivorian origin, was arrested in March 2006 in the Ivory Coast and extradited to France. Fofana’s gang apparently used young women as bait to lure their victims, and were suspected of being behind two other extortion rackets that involved threatening doctors, businessmen and minor celebrities. During police questioning, Fofana reportedly said the gang had targeted Halimi because they had presumed Jews were wealthy.
