At the end of last week, three minors allegedly took a 12-year-old girl they knew from school to an empty hangar in Courbevoie, a city just outside Paris. The girl was walking with a friend, but lost her. The victim was held captive for a long time and raped several times while being threatened with death. The perpetrators are also said to have uttered anti-Semitic insults such as “dirty Jew”.
Together with her parents, the girl filed a complaint with the police the next day. He managed to identify three suspected perpetrators on Tuesday. Three teenagers between 12 and 13 years old, according to the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office.
Faith hidden
One of the teenagers, according to the French newspaper The Parisian told investigators that he acted out of revenge because the girl at school had hidden her Jewish religion from him. One of the other boys told investigators that they attacked the girl because of her comments about the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Two of the three suspects have now been charged by an investigating judge with rape, assault, attempted extortion, death threats, violence and insults. In addition, the aggravating circumstance for the last two crimes is that there were religious motives.
The accusation of extortion follows The Parisian because, according to the girl, one of the perpetrators threatened to kill her if she went to the police. She also had to transfer 200 euros to one of the perpetrators the next day, otherwise he would find her and her family. The trio has also been charged with various privacy violations, because they made images of how they abused the girl and possibly immediately distributed them afterwards.
The third suspect is accused of witnessing the abuse and assault of the girl, while he did not intervene.
Hate messages
The brutal rape by minors and the possible anti-Semitic motives are causing a lot of commotion in France. French President Emmanuel Macron, among others, calls on schools to consider “the consequences of hate messages” in the coming days.
Marine Le Pen of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) blamed the “months of stigmatization of Jews by the left-wing parties in France”. According to her, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in France has “increased by 300 percent”. While the French Greens stressed that “anti-Semitism and violence against women are gaping wounds in our French society”. “We must finally face this and take decisive action against it,” said Marine Tondelier of Les Ecologistes.
On Wednesday evening, a meeting of various associations fighting anti-Semitism took place in front of Paris City Hall.(