Prosecutors in France on Monday accused a 55-year-old recovering drug addict from Lyon of murdering his 89-year-old neighbor in 2022 because the alleged victim was Jewish.
The defendant, Rachid Kheniche, whose trial opened Monday at the city’s Assize Court of Rhône, confessed to killing René Hadjaj by throwing him off the balcony of the Lyon apartment building where both men resided, his lawyer said.
Kheniche, who was living alone and was reportedly recovering from an addiction to hard drugs at the time of the killing, denies that he did so because his slain neighbor was Jewish. Kheniche has said he was experiencing a psychotic episode when he strangled Hadjaj and threw him to his death, but his lawyer did not submit an insanity defense.
Under the French penal code, aggravated circumstances to a racist hate crime carries extra penalties. In the case of murder, it may increase the maximum sentence of 30 years in jail to a life sentence.
“Two psychiatric evaluations show his discernment was altered, although this is not a defense of lacking discernment,” the AFP news agency quoted the lawyer, Océane Pilloix, as saying, referring to an insanity plea. “He is [criminally] liable,” she added.
Kheniche and Hadjaj knew each other and had had a friendly relationship, where one neighbor would visit the other on occasion, prosecutors told the Le Progres daily. But the two men had an altercation that ended with Hadjaj’s death after being thrown down from the balcony of his 17th floor apartment, they added.
The police introduced antisemitism as a possible motive after seeing social media posts by Kheniche. He had made multiple derogatory references to “sayanim,” the transcription in French of the Arab-language word for Zionists, on social media in the years leading up to the incident.
“Elements that were collected on social networks became known to the prosecutors, who have decided to broaden the scope of the examining magistrates to the aggravating circumstances of a crime committed due to an ethnic, national, racial or religious affiliation,” Nicolas Jacquet, the Lyon regional prosecutor, told AFP.
“The anti-Jewish nature of the act is completely proven, both materially and ideologically,” AFP quoted Franck Serfati, a lawyer for two associations that have joined the case as civil parties, as saying. Serfati represents the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism and the Jewish Observatory of France. The CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities and another group also entered as civil parties to the trial.
The case echoes that of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman who was murdered and thrown from her apartment in Paris by a neighbor in 2017. In that case, French courts concluded that the neighbor, a 27-year-old man named Kobili Traore, was motivated to kill Halimi because she was Jewish. But Traore, who is Muslim, was not tried because multiple courts ruled that he was psychotic at the time of the killing, in part because he was high on marijuana.
Kheniche’s social media posts, made across dozens of accounts each with very few followers, are disjointed and unclear.
In one tweet from 2020, a rant that he addressed to Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party, he wrote: “Mrs. Le Pen you were on the cover of an Israeli magazine, photo on the front cover the jews of france are safe with RL [Rassemblement national, i.e. the National Rally], in meetings rn you say priority to Frenchmen, double speak like ramadan tarek or sayan sayanime like Zemmour, as in journalist Israel my mother is Jewish.”
“Ramadan tarek” refers to Tariq Ramadan, an Islamist scholar who is accused of airing multiple conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews. In 2014, he said the murder of four people at the Brussels Jewish Museum was an Israeli false flag operation. Éric Zemmour is a French-Jewish politician and journalist.
