Suspect arrested in Jew torture case

Published: 7:18AM Friday February 24, 2006 Source: Reuters

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Ivory Coast police have arrested the suspected leader of a gang accused in the kidnapping and torture death of a Jewish man near Paris and will hand him over to France, officials in both countries said on Thursday.
   
French police accuse Youssef Fofana, a French citizen, of leading a gang that killed 23-year-old Ilan Halimi in a case that has triggered a public outcry over anti-Semitism in France.
   
Halimi was found naked, tortured and burned south of Paris after being held for three weeks by a gang demanding a large ransom. He died of his injuries shortly afterwards.
   
Police arrested Fofana in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan late on Wednesday and said they would turn him over to Paris. France's prime minister said this would happen within hours.
   
"In this odious case, it's important that the justice can be served very quickly," French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told Canal Plus television.
   
Villepin's office in Paris issued a statement saying the prime minister had spoken by telephone with Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo.
   
"The latter confirmed that Youssef Fofana will be repatriated to France in the next few hours, within the framework of an operation of judicial support between the two countries," the statement said, suggesting there would be no lengthy extradition procedures.
   
Fofana, born in France to parents from former colony Ivory Coast, told police Halimi's murder had not been planned, an Ivorian officer involved with the case told Reuters.
   
"He said there was no plan to kill him. He only wanted the money," the officer told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "We will listen to what he has to say and then the French police will leave with him." 
   
Outcry
   
French police have said Youssef Fofana called himself the "brain of the barbarians" and accuse his gang of trying to kidnap six other people, four of them Jewish.
   
Thirteen people have been indicted in Paris in the case, of which 11 are being held. Five more have been detained in connection with the case elsewhere in France and a suspect has been arrested in Belgium.
   
Initially police said Halimi's murder was motivated by greed, not religion, but this week French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy denounced it as an anti-Semitic crime targeted at Jewish people because they were regarded as having money.
   
He said police had linked some suspects to documents supporting Palestinian and arch-conservative Islamic causes.
   
The brutal murder shocked the French public and suggestions that the government had been slow to react caused a furore.
   
President Jacques Chirac and Villepin were both due to attend a memorial ceremony for Halimi at Paris's main synagogue later on Thursday.
   
Interim Ivory Coast Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny told a French Jewish radio station he did not think the crime had an anti-Semitic connotation.
   
"I think one should not dignify it with that name. It was a villainous crime, odious," he told Radio Shalom.
   
France has Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish minorities, but Muslims number about 5 million and Jews just 600,000.
   
Many Arabs and Jews are immigrants and live uneasily side-by-side in poor neighbourhoods. Disaffected Muslim youths were widely blamed for a wave of anti-Semitic violence earlier this decade.
   
French police have said Fofana's gang used young women to lure targets to locations where they could be kidnapped. The woman who lured Halimi has given herself up to police.

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