French court rules Jewish woman’s Muslim murderer not criminally liable as he smoked pot

Judge finds Muslim murderer of French Jewish woman not responsible for his actions due to smoking marijuana beforehand.

By World Israel News Staff

On Friday, a judge of inquiry in France ruled that Kobili Traore, 27, is probably not criminally responsible for the brutal murder of his neighbor Dr. Sarah Attal-Halimi, 65, because he had smoked marijuana beforehand.

In the French justice system, a judge of inquiry decides whether indicted defendants should stand trial.

Francis Khalifat, president of Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF), an umbrella group of French Jewish communities, called the ruling “unsurprising but hardly justifiable,” reported JTA.

CRIF also claimed that the French authorities were hiding the anti-Semitic nature of the murder as part of a “cover up.”

The murder occurred April 4, 2017. Traore, a Muslim, entered the Jewish Halimi’s apartment, beat her and hurled her out the third-floor window.

It was reported that terrified neighbors heard Traore shouting “Allahu Akhbar” and “Shaitan” (Arabic for Satan), along with Halimi’s cries for help.

Relatives of the victim told police that she was scared of Traore as he had previously called her daughter “dirty Jewess.”

In May 2017, Jean-Alexandre Buchinger, an attorney for the victim’s family, said Traore should have been charged with “murder with anti-Semitism as an aggravating circumstance,” according to The Times British daily.

Traore’s lawyers insisted that he was too intoxicated from ingesting cannabis to be held responsible for his actions.

Sammy Ghozlan, a former police commissioner and founder of France’s Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, told JTA in May that the handling of the Halimi case has made him “no longer have full confidence that anti-Semitic hate crimes in France are handled properly.”

In June, Algemeiner reported, “Despite having a previous criminal record and no documented episodes of mental illness, two of the three psychiatric reports on Traore commissioned by the Paris investigative magistrate concluded that he could not be held criminally responsible for Halimi’s death, on the grounds of impaired judgement caused by his chronic consumption of marijuana.”

The murderer could be hospitalized for treatment of psychotic lapses or made to attend a drug rehabilitation program.

CRIF and others will appeal the ruling.

France’s interior minister Christophe Castaner reported earlier this year a 74 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 over 2017.