An 85-year-old woman who survived the wartime roundup of Jews by the Vichy regime was found stabbed to death in her apartment after a fire broke out in what investigators are treating as an anti-Semitic attack.
Two suspects have been arrested by police in Paris in connection with the murder, though so far neither has been identified. The body of 85-year-old Mireille K. had been found after a fire broke out in her apartment in Paris’s 11th District on Friday evening and an autopsy soon revealed the presence of 11 stab wounds leading investigators to believe she had been murdered, L’Express reports.
According to the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), one of the country’s leading Jewish organisations, Mireille K. had been a survivor of the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv roundup by the Vichy regime during the Second World War which saw the mass arrest of over 13,000 Jews.
A French judicial official says two suspects have been given preliminary charges for the murder with anti-Semitic motives of an elderly Jewish woman.
The two men have been jailed, the official said. He was speaking anonymously to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The CRIF commented on the incident saying that the organisation “expects from the authorities the utmost transparency in the ongoing investigation so that the reasons for this barbaric crime are known to all as quickly as possible”.
French politician Meyer Habib has claimed that one of the suspects arrested was the neighbour of the victim, a 35-year-old Muslim man who was already well-known to police. In a Facebook post, Habib wrote: “Mireille K. knew the suspect, currently in custody: a 35-Year-old Muslim neighbour, a sex offender, whom she had known since he was a child.”
Habin and many others have compared the murder to last year’s killing of 66-year-old Jewish woman Dr. Sarah Halimi who was beaten and thrown off a balcony to her death by a radical Islamic extremist migrant named Kada Traore. According to investigators, Traore, originally from Mali, shouted “Allah hu Akbar!” as he savagely beat the woman.
Both cases highlight the growing anti-Semitism in Paris that has forced many Jews in heavily migrant populated neighbourhoods to move elsewhere.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com
The Associated Press contributed to this report