The police are believed to have initially gone to the wrong building while Traoré climbed a balcony from the apartment where the family was sheltering behind a locked door, to the apartment of Halimi, the only Jewish resident of the building. An immigrant from Mali, Traoré was reportedly enraged following a family dispute and gained access to the neighbouring apartment of a different family, who immediately locked themselves into a bedroom, phoned police for help, and waited in fear as they listened to the intruder reciting verses from the Quran. After his arrest, he claimed insanity and was promptly held in a psychiatric hospital. Traoré, a drug dealer and drug addict, had previously frightened Halimi with repeated antisemitic insults. This occurred at her residence, a third-floor apartment in the Belleville district of Paris on 4 April 2017. It is uncertain if she was killed before the fall or if death occurred as a result of the fall.
He attempted to suffocate her, and then defenestrated her. ĭr Sarah Attal-Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman who was a retired physician and mother of three children, was asleep in her apartment when her 27-year old neighbor Kobili Traoré broke in and beat her with a phone and then his fists, leaving her body with several fractures. The killing has been compared to the murder of Mireille Knoll in the same arrondissement less than a year later, and to the murder of Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah Halimi) eleven years earlier. The decision was appealed to the supreme Court of Cassation, who in 2021 upheld the lower court's ruling. The assailant was declared to be not criminally responsible when the judges ruled he was undergoing a psychotic episode due to cannabis consumption, as established by an independent psychiatric analysis.
The government eventually acknowledged an antisemitic motivation for the killing. Circumstances surrounding the killing-including the fact that Halimi was Jewish, and that the assailant (Kobili Traoré) had shouted Allahu akbar during the attack and afterward proclaimed "I killed the Shaitan"-cemented the public perception, particularly among the French Jewish community, that it was a stark example of antisemitism in modern France.įor several months the government and some of the media hesitated to label the killing as antisemitic, drawing criticism from public figures such as Bernard-Henri Lévy. Sarah Halimi was a retired French doctor and schoolteacher who was attacked and killed in her apartment by her neighbor on 4 April 2017.