Thousand people in Paris demand justice for Ilan Halimi

More than Thousand Jews marched on Sunday in the streets of Paris, demanding justice for Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Jewish man who was abducted, tortured and killed near Paris by an organised and dangerous gang.

The spontaneous gathering failed to get support from any Jewish organization.

Information on the demonstration circulated within the Jewish community through mobile phone and e-mail messages.

Marchers walked down Voltaire Boulevard, past the mobile phone store where Ilan Halimi used to work and where he was approached by his killers a month ago.

During the Sunday protest young demonstrators shouted “Justice for Ilan”, “revenge of Ilan”, “Fofana murderer”, in a reference to Youssef Fofana, the head of the gang who is still at large.

Jews from every age and background participated in the walk under heavy rain.

Many of them were holding leaflets with Ilan Halimi’s picture, the only photography the Halimi family accepted to give out to the press, and only to Jewish and Israeli media.

Incidents due to unnanounced march

A few incidents occurred at the end of the gathering. A driver forced his way through the demonstrators and was chased down by dozens of young men who damaged the vehicle.

The police was blamed because it didn’t prevent cars from circulating down the Boulevard. But undesired incidents were to be expected in this unannounced spontaneous march.

A member of the Lubavitch community addressed the crowd with a loudspeaker and said: “We are being mocked. Nobody takes us seriously. How much longer is this going to last? May the Messiah arrive soon.”

The crowd ended its tribute to Ilan Halimi by saying the Kaddish prayer and observing a minute of silence in front of the mobile phone store.

Gang chief still at large

While three of the 13 people arrested have been indicted, French police were still hunting for Youssef Fofana, the 26-yar-old black Muslim African man, considered as the mastermind of the kidnapping ring suspected of using charming women to lure Ilan Halimi to his death.

Fofana, who nicknames himself “Brain of Barbarians, is described as ”extremely dangerous.“

The gang is suspected of abducting the 23-year-old Parisian, and subjecting him to horrific tortures before dumping his naked and mutilated body in the street near a suburban train station last Monday.

Handcuffed, gagged and covered in burns and torture marks, he died on the way to hospital.

Twelve suspects, aged 17 to 32, were held in overnight raids in the south Paris suburbs, most on a housing estate in Bagneux, while a 13th was arrested in Belgium, Paris state prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin told a press conference on Friday.

Halimi went missing in late January after agreeing to a date with an unknown woman who approached him at his workplace.

Using beautiful women as ”bait“, the gang are thought to have attempted six or seven other botched kidnappings, Marin said.

Jewish community shocked

Halimi’s abduction has sent a shockwave through France’s Jewish community, since Halimi and several other targets were Jewish, leading France’s Jewish community umbrella group, the CRIF, to issue an appeal for calm and caution on Friday.

But “uneasiness” was perceptible in the Paris synagogues over Shabbat.

On the eve of the annual CRIF dinner, which will bring together France’s main political, social, religious leaders and Jewish community dignitaries, many Jews are expecting that they pay tribute to the memory of Ilan Halimi.

”As one of the topics of this dinner is expected to be the drop in anti-Semitic acts in the country last year, this murder is giving this dinner another course,“ a Jewish official told EJP.

Halimi’s family and Jewish community security services for they part said they suspect that the crime may have been motivated by anti-Semitism.

“We think there is anti-Semitism in this affair,” Rafi, Ilan’s brother in law, told EJP. He mentioned the fact that the kidnappers recited verses of the Koran during phone appeals to the family.

French daily Le Monde revealed that one of the people arrested told police that the gang had chosen “Jewish targets.”

Some 1,000 people attended the young man’s burial ceremony at a Jewish cemetery in Paris on Friday.

Prosecutor : No evidence of anti-Semitic motive

But the Paris prosecutor said there was ”so far no evidence of an anti-Semitic motive“ and that the gang was apparently driven by money.

Text messages and emails showing pictures of him, captive and blindfolded, had been sent to his family along with demands for a 400,000-euro ransom.

According to the prosecutor, however, Halimi was tortured in scenes reminiscent of the abuse of prisoners at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib jail.

Held prisoner in a Bagneux apartment, ”naked, with his face covered,“ he was abused in ”a repetition of scenes seen elsewhere“, the prosecutor said.

Marin also said the ringleader had repeated his ransom demands in a telephone call to Halimi’s family on Thursday, days after the young man’s body was found, threatening them with death unless they paid.

Police quoted in the French press had questioned whether money was the real motive, one saying the gang appeared to playing a sadistic ”game“.

The gang had lowered its ransom demands from 400,000 euros to 100,000 then dropping them as low as 5,000 euros, before it eventually broke off contact.

The breakthrough in the investigation came on Thursday, when a young blonde woman turned herself in to police, saying she had recognized herself in a computer-generated portrait of a suspect circulated to the press.

She confirmed that she had been asked to entice two young men, without knowing what they risked, but had failed to draw them in.

The young women, who has also been detained, agreed to lead police to the other gang members.

The gang’s method of luring in kidnap victims mirrors the plot of a 1990s French film ”L’Appat” (The Bait) by film director Bertrand Tavernier.