Murder of Ilan Halimi

The leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana (born 1980), who had been born in Paris to parents from Côte d'Ivoire, fled to his parents' homeland together with the woman used as bait.

The murder of Ilan Halimi (אילן חלימי) was the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a young Frenchman of Moroccan Jewish ancestry in France in 2006.

Halimi was kidnapped on 21 January 2006 by a group of Muslims calling themselves the Gang of Barbarians.

The kidnappers, believing that all Jews are rich, repeatedly contacted the victim's modestly placed family demanding very large sums of money.

Halimi was held captive and tortured for three weeks, and died of his injuries.

The case drew national and international attention as an example of antisemitism in France.

Halimi was a mobile phone salesman living in Paris with his divorced mother and his two sisters.

On 20 January 2006, one of the perpetrators, Sorour Arbabzadeh (known as Yalda or Emma ), a 17-year-old girl of French-Iranian origin, went to the phone store in Paris where Halimi worked and struck up a conversation with him.

She eventually asked for Halimi's number, which he gave to her, and left the store.

The woman called him the next evening and told him to come to her apartment for a drink.

He was lured to an apartment block in the Parisian banlieues where he was ambushed and held captive by the group upon arrival.

No one saw or heard from Halimi until the next afternoon, when his sister received an email containing a picture that showed Halimi gagged and tied up to a chair with a gun to his head.

In text, the abductors threatened his life and demanded 450,000 euros from his family, stating that they would kill him if they went to the police.

Not having the money, though, Halimi's family had no other option than to contact the police.

The abductors, who called themselves the Gang of Barbarians, tortured him and sent phone and video messages to his family while they were in contact with the police.

During the 24 days of abduction, the leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana, managed to travel back and forth to his home country of Ivory Coast.

At some point he was suspected of being related to the gang and was taken to the police station, but they were forced to release him due to a lack of proof of his connection to the group.

The demand for ransom, initially elevated at 450,000 euros, diminished as the abductors got more anxious with the attention they were drawing from the police and media.

After three weeks and no success in finding the captors, the family and the police stopped receiving messages from the captors.

Halimi, severely tortured, more than 80% burned and unclothed, was dumped next to a road at Sainte-Geneviève-Des-Bois on 13 February 2006.

He was found by a passer-by who immediately called for an ambulance.

Halimi died from his injuries on his way to the hospital.

The decision by the police to keep certain matters secret was seen as counter-productive, and may have prevented a facial composite of Sorour Arbabzadeh ("Emma"), the girl who lured Halimi to the apartment.

Investigation showed that more than twenty people, some of them teenagers, took part directly or indirectly in the kidnapping.

Some of them later claimed they never knew his fate, and Arbabzadeh (who was seventeen at the time), later sent a letter to his family to say how sorry she was.

A woman, referred to as Audrey L., surrendered after the police had released a facial composite picture.

She pointed to the Barbarians, a gang of (North) African immigrants who had perpetrated similar abductions in the past.

In the subsequent days, French police arrested 15 people in connection with the crime.

They were arrested on February 23 in Abidjan and extradited to France on March 4, 2006.

The kidnappers originally thought Halimi was wealthy because he came from a Jewish family, although he came from the same poor and working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris as the kidnappers did.

According to then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, members of the gang confessed that they believed all Jews to be rich and it motivated them to target several Jews.

The kidnappers demanded ransom, initially EUR 450,000, eventually decreasing to EUR 5,000.

It has been claimed that the family of Halimi was told that if they could not raise the money, they should get it from the Jewish community.

In order to convince Halimi's parents their son had been kidnapped, the abductors sent a picture of the young man being threatened by a gun and holding a newspaper to prove the date and time.

The French police were heavily criticized because they initially believed that antisemitism was not a factor in the crime.

Police have attributed to the banlieues' gang subculture a "poisonous mentality that designates Jews as enemies along with other 'outsiders,'" such as Americans, mainstream French, and Europeans in general.

"If they could have gotten their hands on a (non-Jewish) French cop in the same way, they probably would have done the same thing," a retired police chief opined.

This may have hampered the original investigation.

Antisemitism is an aggravating circumstance (circonstance aggravante) in a murder case in France.

Ruth Halimi, Ilan's mother, subsequently co-authored a book with Émilie Frèche titled 24 jours: la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 days: the truth about the death of Ilan Halimi), released April 2009.