Lyon: Muslim throws Jew out of 17th floor window - authorities say murderer has mental problems
Nearly a week after the death of René Hadjaj, 89, on Tuesday May 17, pushed from the 17th floor of a building bar in the Duchère district, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon, the French Jewish community remains in turmoil.
The case, little publicized, provoked on social networks the specter of a new anti-Semitic crime.
While the police arrested a 51-year-old neighbor and opened a judicial investigation for intentional homicide, the exact circumstances have yet to be established. Several questions emerge: why was René Hadjaj defenestrated, in particular from a floor higher than the one on which he lived (the second)? Is this indeed a neighborhood dispute as indicated by the police? Does his murder have an anti-Semitic background?
Local newspaper Le Progrès reported that police initially investigated a possible anti-Semitic motive, but later ruled it out. Investigators believe that the incident would follow a neighborhood dispute that was not related to the fact that Hadjdaj was Jewish. French media did not report the suspect's identity or other details about him.
According to the National Bureau of Vigilance against Anti-Semitism, the suspect, placed in custody in the premises of the departmental security and then in pre-trial detention, would be of Arab-Muslim origin. The two locals apparently used to hang out. The association asked that the anti-Semitic background be retained a priori so that it could be retained or eliminated during the investigation.
The CRIF presented its condolences to the family of the victim and Francis Kalifat, its president, spoke on this subject with the deputy chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior.
“CRIF Auvergne Rhône-Alpes will be very attentive to the smooth running of the investigation and trusts the police and judicial authorities to ensure that the legal disaster in the Sarah Halimi case does not happen again. Pending additional information and at the express request of the family whose mourning must be respected, no hasty conclusions should be drawn up or circulated as it stands,” the organization said.
Elements of the case indeed recall the death of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman beaten by her neighbor and then thrown from her Parisian apartment in April 2017. The assassin, Kobili Traoré, has since been declared criminally irresponsible. He had smoked copious amounts of marijuana, which judges ruled triggered a psychotic episode, rendering him not responsible for his actions at the time of the murder. The crime and its consequences led to a series of protests and demonstrations in France.
More recently, a Jewish man, Jérémie Cohen, died in the Paris suburbs after hitting a tram as he was fleeing a group of individuals who had attacked him in the street.
The family later warned that the crime may not have an anti-Semitic motive.
Source: Times of Israel
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