One of the suspects said he acted out of revenge because the victim had kept her Jewish faith from him. The other testified that the little girl was attacked because of her comments about Palestine.
The gang rape of a 12-year-old girl accompanied by anti-Semitic violence in Courbevoie, near Paris, caused shock and outrage in France. In connection with the crime, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Compact (RN), who led the polls in the campaign before the early elections to the National Assembly at the end of June, accused the "extreme left" of "stigmatizing the Jews".
On Tuesday evening, the prosecutor's office in Nanterre, near Paris, opened proceedings against two 13-year-old boys on suspicion of gang rape, death threats and anti-Semitic violence, while a third boy, also a minor, is accused of other crimes in the case. The suspects were remanded in custody.
According to police sources, the 12-year-old victim was called on Saturday by the three boys in a park near his residence in Courbevoie, where he was talking with a friend.
The little girl was dragged by the suspects to a hangar, where she was beaten and then raped by two of them, while they threatened her with death and hurled anti-Semitic insults, which was filmed by the third boy.
The little girl, accompanied by her parents, immediately filed a police report.
One of the three teenagers told investigators he acted out of revenge because the victim had previously kept his Jewish faith from him. Another juvenile reportedly testified that the girl was attacked because of her comments about Palestine.
The crime was condemned by President Emmanuel Macron and members of the government, by leading politicians of all parties, and Marine Le Pen blamed the "extreme left" for "stigmatizing the Jews".
At Wednesday's cabinet meeting, the President of the Republic "condemned the rise of anti-Semitism with solemn and serious words" and asked the Ministry of Education to introduce classes on the fight against anti-Semitism and racism in order to prevent "hate speech with serious consequences from seeping into schools." ", the entourage of the head of state informed.
"It is outrageous that a 12-year-old child was subjected to an anti-Semitic attack and raped," wrote Marine Le Pen on X,
RN's National Assembly faction leader, before criticizing "months of stigmatization of Jews by the extreme left, which has used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for political purposes."
For a long time, the left-wing Disobedient France was the only French political force that refused to call the Islamist Palestinian Hamas a terrorist organization.
and he considered the murders committed by their militants in Israeli territory on October 7 not as a terrorist act, but as a "war crime", and in response to the massacres, he made the Israeli operation launched in the Gaza Strip the focus of his European Parliament election campaign. For this reason, the Socialist Party suspended the left-wing alliance in the National Assembly that was created after the 2022 National Assembly elections in November.
However, for the early two-round elections due on June 30 and July 7, the Socialists, Communists, Greens and the radical left formed an alliance under the name New People's Front, and in their election program they called for the release of the hostages taken during the "massacres of Hamas terrorists". they call for, reject the "theocratic plan" of Hamas and also demand the "release of Palestinian political prisoners".
The leader of the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is accused by his opponents of regularly making ambiguous comments about anti-Semitism. On Wednesday, the 72-year-old politician also reacted to the rape of the Jewish girl on X, indicating that he was "horrified by the rape in Courbevoie (...) and anti-Semitic racism".
The president of the Central Consistory of the largest European Jewish community, representing more than half a million Jews in France, Elie Korchia, condemned "the disgraceful and horrible sexual crime", while Haim Korsia, the Chief Rabbi of France, declared that "there is no excuse for this unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism".
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) expressed its "immeasurable shock" over "the very worrying case".
Cover image source: Pixabay.com
