Demonstrators in Paris gather in memory of Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor brutally murdered in an antisemitic assault. Photo: Reuters / Gonzalo Fuentes.

The son of Mireille Knoll — the French Jewish Holocaust survivor brutally murdered in an allegedly antisemitic attack in her Paris home in March 2018 — expressed solidarity this week with the family of Sarah Halimi, the Jewish woman murdered one year earlier in the French capital, whose accused killer has been excused from criminal trial.

“There should have been a trial, humanly speaking, it is unacceptable that there is no trial,” Daniel Knoll remarked during an interview on Monday with the French-language service of Israeli broadcaster i24 when asked about the Halimi case.

Knoll was speaking a few days after the Paris Prosecutor’s Office referred the case of his mother’s two suspected killers to France’s principal criminal court on a charge of murder aggravated by antisemitism.

The accused pair — Yacine Mihoub, 30, who was a neighbor of Mireille Knoll’s and knew her personally, and Alex Carrimbacus, 24, who became friends with Mihoub when they met in prison — visited her apartment on March 23, 2018, with the aim of robbing her. Forensic investigations later revealed that Knoll had been stabbed 11 times in the back, throat and stomach. The assailants then tried to set fire to her corpse, leaving her remains badly charred.

Contrastingly, last December, Sarah Halimi’s accused killer, 29-year-old Kobili Traore, was deemed unfit to stand trial by French prosecutors — on the grounds that his intake of cannabis on the night of the killing in April 2017 had rendered him temporarily insane. That decision is presently being appealed.

Daniel Knoll also expressed concern at the continued rise of antisemitism in France, observing, “You just have to see what is happening on social media, or walk down the street.” Citing two mugging attacks on the conservative Jewish columnist Eric Zemmour as an example, Knoll argued that antisemitism in France “meets with a laissez-faire attitude, and I think that’s extremely dangerous.”

A poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee in January revealed that nearly a quarter of French Jews had been the victims of antisemitic violence, while 64 percent said that they had been targeted with verbal abuse.