Torturers' Iraq link
Jason Burke in Paris
Sunday February 19, 2006
The Observer
Criminals who tortured and killed a young hostage, keeping him naked and hooded and burning him repeatedly before throwing him from a train, were inspired by images from Iraq, according to a French prosecutor.
Jean-Claude Martin, a senior government lawyer, said that the kidnappers, who kept their victim imprisoned for three weeks, were 'repeating things they had seen practised elsewhere'.
Police have distributed a picture of Youssef Fofana, 26, who is the presumed head of the gang. Last week, a young woman, suspected of acting as 'the lure' in the murder, gave herself up. Raids then resulted in the arrest of 15 other suspects, aged between 17 and 32, in a poor suburb of Bagneux, near Paris.
The 23-year-old victim is thought to have been starved and tortured while negotiations with his family for a ransom of up to €450,000 continued. According to a police source, the violence was 'gratuitous, extreme, spontaneous and without any limits or boundaries'.
The gang was composed of jobless youths from the suburbs around Paris which erupted in violent riots last autumn. They are believed to have made several previous attempts at kidnapping. According to the Liberation newspaper, the gang was inspired by a film which had itself been inspired by a press report.
They had castrated him, cut off his fingers, gouged out his eyes and he was still alive when they found him, only to die in the ambulance.
Supposedly the father was contacted during the funeral and was threatened the same for his wife if the money was not forthcoming.
Crime was
1) "Inspired by pictures from Iraq"
2) Muslim perps
3) Jewish victims
4) Told the family to "get ransom money from synagogue"
5) High incidence of hate crimes by Muslims against Jews in France
logical conclusion -- hate crime directed at a Jew
French official whitewashed conclusion -- no religious motive.