After the national emotion, the judicial time. Two men accused of the anti-Semitic murder of Mireille Knoll, 85, in 2018 are tried from Tuesday, October 26 before the Paris Assize Court. Here’s what you need to know about this case, as the trial is set to run until November 10.
Octogenarian stabbed eleven times
On March 23, 2018, Mireille Knoll, an octogenarian with Parkinson’s disease, was found dead at home. Her body is discovered across his hospital bed, larded with eleven stab wounds, partly charred. The victim, of Jewish faith and who had fled Paris in 1942 to escape the anti-Semitic roundups, was living alone in her three-room low-cost housing located in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, where she regularly received visits from her two sons.
That day, it was Mireille Knoll’s neighbors who called the firefighters around 6.30 p.m., because of smoke in the building. In total, four starts of fires were noted, revealed a few days later The Express, who had access to the summary of the investigation: two on the sofa in the living room, one on the wheelchair used by the old lady and another in the bedroom.
Three people indicted
Two men are accused of the murder of Mireille Knoll. The first, Yacine Mihoub, 28 at the material time, is the son of a neighbor of the octogenarian, whom he had known since childhood. He used to visit the victim and had stopped by to see her in his apartment on the day of the murder, after he had just been released from prison.
The investigation determined that this isolated and unstable man had been joined on the spot by Alex Carrimbacus, 21 years old. This second suspect is presented as an outcast with a psychiatric history. The two men had met in prison, in Fleury-Merogis.
Both were indicted four days after the murder and remanded in custody. They appear before the Assize Court for “murder on a vulnerable person and committed because of the religion of the victim”, “aggravated theft” and “degradation by means dangerous for people”.
Yacine Mihoub’s mother, who lives on the seventh floor of the building, was indicted on April 6, 2018 for “altering evidence of a crime” and placed under judicial supervision. She is accused of having thrown the objects stolen from the victim by her son and Alex Carrimbacus and, above all, for cleaning the knife found in Yacine’s room and which could have been used at the time of the crime. She is also on trial during this trial.
The two suspects accuse each other of the murder
The two men do not deliver the same version of what happened on March 23, 2018 and accuse each other of the murder. Alex Carrimbacus says he was offered by Yacine Mihoub to join him at Mireille Knoll for “a money plan”. He claims to have heard him accuse the octogenarian of having him “balance”, causing his incarceration. In the version of Alex Carrimbacus, Yacine Mihoub would have shouted “you will pay for that”, before bringing him to his bed and slitting his throat to the cries of “God is great”.
Yacine Mihoub claims for his part to have invited Alex Carrimbacus to “have a good time” while drinking glasses. Once there, the latter would have asked if this survivor of the Vel d’Hiv roundup was “armored”, before using the property in the home she had occupied for nearly fifty years. Yacine Mihoub says he then heard screaming from the bedroom and saw Alex Carrimbacus stab her violently.
Each also accuses the other of having launched the various starts of fire in the apartment. To the investigators who are surprised that they still spent the rest of the evening together, both explain having had “fear” the other. Judged versions “not very credible” by the accusation because delivered by two men known for their propensity to lie and condemned several times.
The anti-Semitic character retained
On July 10, 2020, the investigating judges ordered a trial for the two men, in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution. The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed, then November 19, 2020, the anti-Semitic nature of the murder, disputed by the accused.
It was notably selected on the basis of comments by Alex Carrimbacus, who claims to have “believed to hear” Yacine Mihoub “talk about the financial means of the Jews, their good situation”, and Mireille Knoll intervene “to explain that not all Jews had a good situation”, report them investigating judges quoted by AFP. The survey also showed “Yacine Mihoub’s ambivalence vis-à-vis Islamist terrorism which notably advocates anti-Semitism”, noted the judges, who however clarified that no one had ever heard him utter anti-Semitic words.
This explanation had caused a reaction Yacine Mihoub’s lawyers, Me Charles Consigny and Me Fabrice de Korodi, who believe that “the judges were unable to resist the pressure of public opinion”. “There is nothing in the file apart from the statements of Alexandre Carrimbacus which gives any anti-Semitic character to this affair “, they claim.
“Satisfied” the treatment by justice of this “overwhelming record”, the lawyer of the sons of Mireille Knoll, Me Gilles-William Goldnadel, hopes for his part a “severe punishment” for this “horrible crime”.
A case that caused a stir
This murder, which took place a year after that of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish sexagenarian thrown from her balcony, had caused great indignation in the country. Mireille Knoll was “murdered because she was Jewish”, victim of the same “barbaric obscurantism” that Arnaud Beltrame, gendarme killed in the Aude, had declared Emmanuel Macron in 2018, a few days after the facts.
The political class had unanimously condemned the murder of Mireille Knoll, which took place against a backdrop of increases in acts targeting the Jewish community in France. The case had thus revived concerns about anti-Semitism in France. The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (Crif) and other organizations called for a white march (held on March 28, 2018) in his memory and in support of his family.