2006 kidnapping, torture, and murder of a young man in France
The murder of Ilan Halimi () was the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a young Frenchman of Moroccan Jewish ancestry in France in 2006. Halimi was kidnapped on 21 January 2006 by a group calling themselves the Gang of Barbarians. The kidnappers, believing that all Jews are rich, repeatedly contacted the victim's modestly placed family demanding very large sums of money. Halimi was held captive and tortured for three weeks, and died of his injuries. The case drew national and international attention as an example of antisemitism in France.
Kidnapping.
Halimi was a mobile phone salesman living in Paris with his divorced mother and his two sisters.
On 20 January 2006, one of the perpetrators, Sorour Arbabzadeh (known as Yalda or Emma), a 17-year-old girl of French-Iranian origin, went to the phone store in Paris where Halimi worked and struck up a conversation with him. She eventually asked for Halimi's number, which he gave to her, and left the store. The woman called him the next evening and told him to come to her apartment for a drink. He was lured to an apartment block in the Parisian "banlieues" where he was ambushed and held captive by the group upon arrival. No one saw or heard from Halimi until the next afternoon, when his sister received an email containing a picture that showed Halimi gagged and tied up to a chair with a gun to his head. In text, the abductors threatened his life and demanded 450,000 euros from his family, stating that they would kill him if they went to the police. Not having the money, though, Halimi's family had no other option than to contact the police.
The abductors, who called themselves the Gang of Barbarians, tortured him and sent phone and video messages to his family while they were in contact with the police. During the 24 days of abduction, the leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana, managed to travel back and forth to his home country of Ivory Coast. At some point he was suspected of being related to the gang and was taken to the police station, but they were forced to release him due to a lack of proof of his connection to the group. The demand for ransom, initially elevated at 450,000 euros, diminished as the abductors got more anxious with the attention they were drawing from the police and media.
After three weeks and no success in finding the captors, the family and the police stopped receiving messages from the captors. Halimi, severely tortured, more than 80% burned and unclothed, was dumped next to a road at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois on 13 February 2006. He was found by a passer-by who immediately called for an ambulance. Halimi died from his injuries on his way to the hospital.
The decision by the police to keep certain matters secret was seen as counter-productive, and may have prevented a facial composite of Sorour Arbabzadeh ("Emma"), the girl who lured Halimi to the apartment. Investigation showed that more than twenty people, some of them teenagers, took part directly or indirectly in the kidnapping. Some of them later claimed they never knew his fate, and Arbabzadeh (who was seventeen at the time), later sent a letter to his family to say how sorry she was.
A woman, referred to as "Audrey L.", surrendered after the police had released a facial composite picture. She pointed to "the Barbarians", a gang of African immigrants who had perpetrated similar abductions in the past. In the subsequent days, French police arrested 15 people in connection with the crime. The leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana (born 1980), who had been born in Paris to parents from Côte d'Ivoire, fled to his parents' homeland together with the woman used as bait. They were arrested on February 23 in Abidjan and extradited to France on March 4, 2006.
Ransom.
The kidnappers originally thought Halimi was wealthy because he came from a Jewish family.
According to then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, members of the gang confessed that they believed all Jews to be rich and it motivated them to target several Jews.
The kidnappers demanded ransom, initially EUR 450,000, eventually decreasing to EUR 500,000. It has been claimed that the family of Halimi was told that if they could not raise the money, they should get it from the Jewish community.
In order to convince Halimi's parents their son had been kidnapped, the abductors sent a picture of the young man being threatened by a gun and holding a newspaper to prove the date and time.
Police investigation.
The French police were heavily criticized because they initially believed that antisemitism was not a factor in the crime.
Police have attributed to the banlieues' gang subculture a "poisonous mentality that designates Jews as enemies along with other 'outsiders,'" such as Americans, mainstream French, and Europeans in general. "If they could have gotten their hands on a (non-Jewish) French cop in the same way, they probably would have done the same thing," a retired police chief opined. This may have hampered the original investigation. Antisemitism is an aggravating circumstance () in a murder case in France.
Ruth Halimi, Ilan's mother, subsequently co-authored a book with Émilie Frèche titled ("24 days: the truth about the death of Ilan Halimi"), released April 2009. In the book, Ruth claimed that French police never suspected her son's kidnappers would kill the 23-year-old after three weeks in captivity in 2006, partly because they would not face the antisemitic character of the crime (as reported in the French newspaper Le Figaro). Émilie Frèche stated that "by denying the anti-semitic character, ... [the police] did not figure out the profile of the gang." The book details how Ilan's parents were told to stay silent during the ordeal and were ordered not to seek aid in order to pay the ransom, nor show their son's photo to people who might have come forward with information about his whereabouts.
In an interview with "Elle" Magazine on March 27, 2009, Ruth Halimi stated that "The police were completely off the mark. They thought they were dealing with classic bandits, but these people were beyond the norm." Halimi stated that she wrote the book to "alert public opinion to the danger of anti-semitism which has returned in other forms, so that a story like this can never happen again".
Gang of Barbarians.
The crime was committed by a group of persons belonging to a gang calling themselves . Many of them had criminal records and had been imprisoned. A total of 27 people were accused of involvement in the crime and were tried for kidnapping and murder in 2009. One person was acquitted and the rest were convicted. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 22 years before the possibility of parole. The woman who had lured Halimi to his abduction was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. Two of his close associates, Jean-Christophe Soumbou and Samir Ait Abdel Malek, received 18 and 15-year prison terms respectively, and Malek's prison term was later increased to 18 years upon appeal. Six others convicted over their involvement received sentences ranging from 12 to 15 years imprisonment, and seven others received sentences ranging from 8 months to 11 years imprisonment. While Fofana chose not to appeal his sentence, 14 of the 27 verdicts were appealed by the prosecution. The convictions were upheld on appeal in December 2010. In 2017, a Paris court sentenced Fofana to an additional 10 years imprisonment for other extortions he had committed.
During the investigation it appeared that key members of the group were probably implicated in at least 15 other cases of kidnapping or racketeering. Posing as members of the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica or members of the French division of the PFLP, they threatened several high-ranking CEOs including Jérôme Clément, president of the European TV operator Arte, Rony Brauman, former president and co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, and the CEO as well as another high-ranking member of a large company selling home appliances. They sent threatening pictures of an unknown man dressed as a middle-eastern Arab in front of a picture of Osama bin Laden. In another case, the owner of a large grocery store was directed to pay 100,000 euros.
In total, 27 individuals were under investigation and were subsequently put on trial. Among these:
He is suspected of other kidnappings and was responsible for the honeypot activities of the girls.
Others who were implicated:
Many others were implicated, but their direct connection to the crime could not be proven.
2009 trial.
The trial, which started on 29 April 2009, was conducted behind closed doors because two of the suspects were minors.
The Halimi family wanted the trial to be conducted openly. Francis Szpiner spoke for Ruth Halimi, saying, "A public trial would have helped [people] better understand the criminal machine, to make parents and teenagers reflect. It's the law of silence that killed her son, it would be unbearable for the trial to remain silent."
The trial took 10 weeks.
Verdict and sentencing.
On the evening of Friday, 10 July 2009, the verdict was given. Ilan Halimi's mother and others were absent from the court, as the Sabbath had already started.
Of the 27 people on trial, 3 were acquitted.
A number of others, whose implication was not direct, or related to other activities of the gang, received smaller sentences. Three persons were acquitted. Notable is that one person, for whom originally no sentence was asked, received a suspended sentence.
After the trial.
Sorour Arbabzadeh, the then-17-year-old French-Iranian woman who acted as bait to trap Halimi, was sentenced to 9 years imprisonment. While serving her sentence in the Versailles women's prison, she seduced a guard and the director of the prison, Florent Gonçalves, who is now imprisoned himself. For this she was sentenced to four months imprisonment.
2010 retrial.
The sentences issued after the first trial were criticized as too lenient by some parties, while others such as the attorney general Philippe Bilger found the sentences "exemplary". Minister of Justice Michèle Alliot-Marie, demanded an appeal of 8 of the 17 heaviest verdicts.
Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, France's main Jewish organization, said that a law may soon be available that would preclude closed-door trials in this type of case. "Perhaps in a year's time there will be a new trial, and perhaps it will be public."
A Halimi relative said: "The important thing for me is not handing out heavier jail terms, honestly. The important thing is to open this to the press and public and make it a learning experience."
The retrial was officially announced Monday 10 July 2009. It started on 25 October 2010, and ended on 17 December 2010, with all convictions upheld and some sentences extended.
Similar assault.
On 22 February 2008, six members of a group calling themselves "Barbarians" assaulted 19-year-old Mathieu Roumi in the same Paris suburb of Bagneux where Halimi was kidnapped. For two hours the attackers tortured the young man. One shoved cigarette butts into his mouth, another took issue with Roumi's Jewish origin (paternal), grabbed correction fluid and scrawled "sale juif" ("dirty Jew") and "sale PD" ("dirty faggot") on his forehead. When the issue of his sexual orientation arose, one of them placed a condom on the tip of a stick and shoved it in Roumi's mouth. The six men proceeded to scream at him and threaten that he would die the way Halimi did. The men were all arrested.
Public interest and reaction.
The case was widely reported on both in and outside France, and prompted strong reactions.
France.
Then French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin declared that the "odious crime" was antisemitic, and that antisemitism is not acceptable in France.
Six French associations called for a mass demonstration against racism and antisemitism in Paris on Sunday, February 26. Between 33,000 (as estimated by police) and 80,000 to 200,000 (as estimated by the organizers) people participated in Paris, as well as thousands around the country. Present were public figures such as Philippe Douste-Blazy, François Hollande, Lionel Jospin and Nicolas Sarkozy. Also among the participants were Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Paris Mosque and Chairman of the Council of Muslims in France, and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. Right-wing politician Philippe de Villiers was booed by far-left militants and had to leave under police guard.
Following the murder of Halimi, Jewish spokesman for the French Socialist Party Julien Dray claimed that the murder was the