Two suspects arrested in beating of Jewish man in Paris suburb
Published June 2, 2014
(JTA) — Police arrested two men in the severe beating of a Jewish man in Creteil, a Paris suburb.
It was the second anti-Semitic attack there in the last week, a local Jewish watchdog group said.
In the later attack, on May 30, three men in their 20s hit the Jewish man in his face inside his apartment building, SPCJ, the watchdog and security unit of France’s Jewish communities, wrote in a report of the incident that it released to the media on Sunday. During the attack, the report said, the assailants accused the victim of calling the police on them the previous night.
The victim broke his elbow after the assailants caused him to fall down, the SPCJ report said. The hit to the face injured his nose.
The Jewish man, who was not named in the report, said the perpetrators hurled anti-Semitic insults at him during the attack, including “you Jews are all the same” and “dirty Jew.” They also told him that they knew where he and his wife and children lived.
Five days earlier, unidentified men assaulted two Jewish brothers, aged 18 and 21, in Creteil. The attackers used brass knuckles and caused serious but not life-threatening injuries. SPCJ reported that the two Jews were wearing kippahs and are believed to have been targeted because they are Jewish.
The following day, three men were spotted filming the entrance to a Jewish school, Ozar-Hatorah, which is located in the Echat a Creteil district of the southern Parisian suburb, the online edition of the Le Parisien daily reported.
The incidents occurred days after the slaying on May 24 of four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in central Brussels.
On Friday, police in Marseille, France, arrested 29-year-old Mehdi Mennouche, a native of France, on suspicion that he shot the four victims. French police sources said Mennouche had become a radicalized Muslim in prison and then left Europe to fight with jihadists in Syria.