Paris
AP
—
French President Emmanuel Macron pledged Friday that no effort might be spared to trace down and prosecute unknown attackers who chopped down an olive tree planted in homage to a French Jew murdered in 2006.
The commemorative tree for Ilan Halimi, planted 14 years in the past within the northern Paris suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine, was felled on Wednesday night time, seemingly with a chainsaw. The city posted a photograph on its Facebook web page exhibiting the tree’s leafy, bushy high fully severed from its base, leaving simply the stump poking from the bottom.
“Cutting down the tree that honored Ilan Halimi is an attempt to kill him for a second time,” Macron posted on X. “It will not succeed: the Nation will not forget this child of France, killed because he was Jewish.”
“All means are being deployed to punish this act of hatred. In the face of antisemitism, the Republic is always uncompromising.” he added.
Halimi was discovered bare, handcuffed and coated with burn marks close to railroad tracks within the Essonne area south of Paris on Feb. 13, 2006. He died on the way in which to the hospital after being held captive and tortured for greater than three weeks. He was 23. The brutal killing revived worries in France about antisemitism and led to deep nervousness in France’s Jewish neighborhood, the most important in western Europe.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou, in a publish on X, stated the olive tree “was felled by antisemitic hatred.”
“No crime can uproot memory. The never-ending fight against the deadly poison of hatred is our foremost duty,” he wrote.
In a separate publish, the Paris police chief condemned “this ignoble act” and stated an investigation has been launched. “Everything will be done to find the perpetrators and deliver them to justice,” he pledged.
Attackers have beforehand desecrated different efforts to maintain Halimi’s reminiscence alive. In 2017, a commemorative plaque close to Paris was ripped off, thrown on the bottom and coated with antisemitic writing.