Ivory Coast arrests suspect in murder of French Jew

By Loucoumane Coulibaly and Peter Murphy

ABIDJAN (Reuters) – 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 25-year-old Fofana in Ivory Coast’s main
city Abidjan late on Wednesday and said they would turn him
over to Paris. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said
this would happen within hours.

“In this odious case, it’s important that justice can be
served very quickly,” he told Canal Plus television.

The prime minister’s office in Paris said Ivorian President
Laurent Gbagbo had assured Villepin by telephone that Fofana
would be repatriated to France within hours, in the framework
of an operation of judicial support between the two countries.

However, French legal sources said the judges handling the
case wished to submit a proper extradition order, to minimize
the risk of the case being thrown out on a technicality.

“If the French want him to be extradited, we need an
extradition request and we have still not received one,” Ivory
Coast State Prosecutor Raymond Tchimou told Reuters by
telephone, after questioning Fofana.

“ONLY WANTED MONEY”

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.”

French police have said 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 furor.

President Jacques Chirac and Villepin attended a memorial
ceremony for Halimi at Paris’s main synagogue 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 neighborhoods. 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.

(Additional reporting by Paris bureau)