It began on Jan. 20, 2006. A 23 year-old-clerk in a Parisian cell phone store, Ilan Halimi, was caught in a “honeycomb” trap. The trap was set by brutal Islamists who used an attractive woman to lure Halimi.
The young French-Iranian woman went into the shop, flirted with Halimi, and the two exchanged phone numbers. They arranged to meet later that evening. But the girl was not interested in a date with Halimi, she had been tasked with luring a Jew – “they’re all rich” – to a location where he was snatched, stuffed in a car, and kept bound and gagged while being repeatedly tortured.
When Halimi was found 24 days later, he had been bound, beaten, threatened, stabbed, had chunks cut out of his flesh, cigarettes put out on his face, and ultimately doused with alcohol and set aflame, before being dumped in a remote field near a railway line, in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.
When Halimi was found on Feb. 13, 2006, he was unrecognizable: a toe and an ear had been torn from his body, his coloring was more blue than white, and more than 80 percent of his body was burnt from acid. Halimi drew his last breath while being transported to a hospital.
The entire ordeal lasted 24 days. During that time, the Barbarians (indeed and it was the name of the gang who kidnapped and tortured him) made repeated ransom calls, first demanding as much as 450,000 Euros and rapidly dropping the price to 100,00 Euros, then dropping further still. Despite the belief of the barbarians who abducted Ilan, his family was nothing close to wealthy. During phone calls to Halimi’s father, the sounds of chanting from the Koran could be heard over the telephone line.
The case sent shockwaves through the European Jewish world. Not only was the crime gruesome beyond description, but there was a strong second sucker punch: the authorities initially refused to admit that Halimi was targeted because he was a Jew, and they refused to treat the kidnapping as an Islamic-inspired crime and so merely followed the standard protocol for ordinary kidnapping cases, assuming the money was the primary motive.
“Denying the reasons for his torture killed him a second time,” Halimi’s mother, Ruth, wrote in her book, “24 Days,” about her son’s case. In that book she expressed her fury at the French police and public which she said showed an “obstinate refusal” to treat the crime as a racist, anti-Semitic act.
A total of 27 people were tried for Halimi’s kidnapping and murder in 2009. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana, a French national whose family was from Ivory Coast, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 22 years. Several of Fofana’s accomplices received shorter prison sentences, some were suspended, and three were acquitted.
When he was found guilty, Fofana declared, “I killed a Jew, and for that I will go to Paradise.” It was at that point that the police and the public had no choice but to publicly admit that the murder was a crime of anti-Semitism.
At the request of the family, the remains of Ilan Halimi were removed from his initial burial plot in France and reburied in the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem, Israel on Friday, Feb. 9, 2007.
In May 2011, a garden in Paris was renamed after him. Ilan used to play in this garden as a child.
The book written by Ruth Halimi, “24 days, The Truth About the Death of Ilan Halimi” (translated from the French), was later made into a movie.