A sign in Paris calling for justice for Sarah Halimi. Photo: Twitter.

The director of a documentary broadcast on French television concerning the antisemitic murder in 2017 of Sarah Halimi — a 65-year-old Jewish woman who lived on her own in a public housing project in Paris — has slammed the police and judicial investigation into the killing as “absolutely scandalous, the opposite of what I expect from French justice.”

The director, François Margolin, was speaking to the leading news outlet Le Figaro following the broadcast of his film, “Sarah Halimi: An Antisemitic Crime Unpunished,” on France’s RMC network on Sunday night. The film sought to reconstruct the crime and the consequent botched investigation that led to the accused killer, Halimi’s neighbor Kobili Traore, avoiding a trial on the grounds that his intake of cannabis on Apr. 4, 2017 — the night he broke into Halimi’s apartment and beat her savagely while shouting antisemitic epithets before ejecting her body from a third floor window — had rendered him temporarily insane.

The flawed investigation into Halimi’s death culminated in the April 2021 announcement by France’s highest court that since Traore had taken what it termed an “acute delirious puff” on a cannabis joint that eliminated his “discernement” — or self-awareness — he could not “be judged criminally even when his mental state was caused by the regular consumption of drugs.”

In response, Crif, the French-Jewish representative organization, angrily countered that “now in our country, we can torture and kill Jews with impunity.”

In both his film and his subsequent interview, Margolin focused on the role of the investigating judge in the case, Anne Ihuellou, who announced the formal end to the investigation in May 2019. Margolin said he had managed to obtain “the very rare testimony of the investigating judge, who showed a total lack of empathy for the victim and explained that she had ‘too much work to carry out a reconstitution of the crime,’ or even simply to receive the family’s lawyers. It’s nauseating.”

He charged that from “day one,” the judge had decided that “that the murderer is not responsible” and that she had “conducted the investigation only to comfort herself in this opinion. This is absolutely scandalous and, in my opinion, the opposite of what I expect from French justice.” Ihuellou’s decision was partly based on assessments carried out by two psychiatrists, one of whom told Margolin in the documentary that he had revised his view that Traore could not be considered culpable. “It’s easy to understand, listening to them, that psychiatry is not an exact science,” Margolin said.

Margolin also criticized the police, who arrived at Halimi’s apartment as Traore was beating her and yet refrained from intervening.

“They stood outside the door ‘waiting for orders’ while the murderer shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ over and over again, and many neighbors watched the crime live from their balconies in the courtyard,” he pointed out. He added that police officers were offered an alternative entrance to Halimi’s apartment when her immediate neighbors — the Diarra family, relatives of Traore — offered them access from the balcony of their apartment, the same route taken by Traore himself.

“If the crime weren’t so atrocious, it would be almost laughable,” Margolin said.

Margolin’s documentary also highlighted Traore’s lifestyle, emphasizing that “everything was in place for him to be tried, and there was no need to rewrite the law to do so.” Prior to murdering Halimi, Traore had garnered more than 25 convictions for drug dealing, drug use and violence.

“No extenuating circumstances were ever found in these cases,” Margolin said. But in the case of Halimi, “all of a sudden, it’s explained that he’s had a ‘delirious flush,’ something that’s perfectly unprovable since it may never come back. And what’s even more astonishing – if I dare say it – is that the first psychiatric examinations took place more than four months after the crime. Without being paranoid, this gave the murderer time to prepare.”

Margolin argued that there was evidence that Traore had regarded the murder as an act of martyrdom.

“If he was crazy, why would he have come to his cousins and neighbors, the Diarras, on the morning of the crime, to drop off clean clothes in order to change?” he asked. “As someone who made a film about Salafists [Islamist militants] a few years ago, and who knows them well, I know that this is what is done by those who are preparing to become martyrs.” In addition, Traore had “frequented the Omar mosque, two hundred meters from his home, which is one of the most radical mosques in France,” Margolin noted. “He had been there a few hours before the murder.”

In the documentary, lawyer Gilles-William Goldnadel, one of the Halimi family’s representatives, warned that Traore could be discreetly released from the psychiatric hospital where he resides “at any time.” The decision rests with the doctors at the hospital, who are empowered to discharge Traore if they deem that he no longer poses a danger to others.

“There’s really no reason for him to stay there, since what he’s got – ‘this delusional fit’ – can’t be treated,” Margolin said. He further claimed that Traore had already been “given regular leave and made videos with his friends on TikTok, which were immediately deleted.”

Margolin said that one goal of his documentary was to present a rounded picture of Halimi as a human being.

“I didn’t want Sarah Halimi to be reduced to a simple photo – always the same, in black and white,” he said. “I wanted to bring her back to life, if I can put it that way. I wanted to find people who had known her, who had helped her set up a crèche in the Marais [a traditionally Jewish neighborhood of Paris], people who would give her back her soul.”

France has experienced a steady rise in antisemitism across two decades, with several Jews killed as a result. Their number includes Sebastien Salem, a DJ murdered in 2003 by a Muslim childhood friend; Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah Halimi), a mobile-phone salesman who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by an antisemitic criminal gang in 2006; and Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor who was robbed and then burned to death in her own home by two youths, one of whom she had known since his childhood, in 2018. Additionally, there were the victims of the Islamist gun attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and a kosher market in Paris in 2015 — eight in all, among them three young children.

Margolin asserted that both Halimi’s killing and the lack of impunity for Traore marked the most serious antisemitic episode in France since the 1894 trial of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely convicted of espionage, whose case sparked a deadly wave of anti-Jewish violence across the country. Halimi’s fate proved that “one can kill a Jewish woman, in the heart of Paris, and not be punished,” he said.