YNET NEWS: France: 'Gang of Barbarians' Leader Confesses to Killing Halimi
Youssouf Fofana tells Paris court 'you know very well it was me' during presentation of forensic evidence; says he set young Jew alight
Youssouf Fofana, the presumed leader of the "gang of barbarians", confessed on Friday to killing French Jew Ilan Halimi in 2006 after detaining and torturing him for three weeks, said a source familiar with the case.
The trial is being held behind closed doors at a juvenile court in Paris because two of the remaining 26 defendants were minors at the time of the murder.
According to the source, who was present at the hearing, Fofana said "Yes, I did it; you know very well that it was me" during the presentation of the findings of two forensic experts who had examined Halimi's body.
AFP further quoted the source as saying that Fofana admitted to pouring a flammable liquid on Halimi and then setting him alight.
The prosecution described 28-year-old Fofana, whose parents came to France from Ivory Coast, as a "perverted megalomaniac" who instructed accomplices to target Jews for ransom kidnappings "because they are loaded with dough (money)".
French authorities found 23-year-old Halimi naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks near railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris on Feb. 13, 2006.
He died on the way to the hospital and was later buried in Israel. >>> AFP | Friday, May 29, 2009
THE FROZEN NORTH: Ilan Halimi – A Murder in France
In January 2006, a young man named Ilan Halimi arranged a date with a woman he’d met in the shop where he worked. She was a member of “The Barbarians,” a gang who lay in wait for Halimi that night and kidnapped him.
Over the next three weeks, Halimi was held in a basement and tortured to death. Beaten, stabbed and burned over four fifths of his body, Halimi was eventually found handcuffed and abandoned in a field. Halimi died on the way to hospital.
Now, over three years later, Youssouf Fofana, the leader of “The Barbarians,” is being tried in Paris for the role he played in those crimes. Fofana “swaggered into court” and shouted out the takbir (Allahu Akbar). He has also stated that he has “friends” in court who can take photographs and identify jurors. Fofana had previously tried to escape justice by fleeing to the Ivory Coast, but he was quickly tracked down and extradited back to France.
Twenty six other members of Fofana’s “Barbarians” are facing charges as well; one of the most disturbing aspects of this crime is the way so many people participated in it. Several of the accused have admitted that Halimi was targeted because he was Jewish, and they believed that their victim’s family would be able to meet their ransom demands.
In 2008, in the same Parisian suburb of Bagneux where Ilan Halimi was held captive, six youths abducted Mathieu Roumi. They handcuffed and beat him, wrote “dirty jew” on his forehead, and told him that he would die the same way Ilan Halimi did before finally releasing him. The American writer Nidra Poller has also compared Halimi’s murder with the killing of Sebastien Selam, a twenty three year old who worked as a DJ in a Parisian nightclub, by one of his Muslim neighbours. Selam’s murderer not only “smote his victim above the neck,” he mutilated his face and eyes. The murderer then returned to his family home, where he told his mother that he would go to paradise because he had killed a jew.
After Ilan Halimi was murdered, the Simon Wiesenthal Center sent a message to Nicolas Sarkozy, at that time the interior minister, saying, “These acts are a test for Europe. Jihadi violence, hatred and anti-Semitism must be prevented from taking root in French soil.” Sarkozy replied that antisemitic violence is “not inevitable” in France, and he considers combating it to be “a moral imperative.”
Ilan’s mother, Ruth Halimi, has said that she wants the public to know what happened to her son, so that this kind of story never has to be told in France again. [Source: The Frozen North] Written by niccolo65 | Monday, May 6, 2009
