Killing of Sarah Halimi

Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired French physician and former schoolteacher, was asleep in her third-floor apartment in the Belleville district of Paris when her 27-year-old neighbor, Kobili Traoré, broke in on 4 April 2017. A different family in a neighboring apartment, through which Traoré had passed to reach Halimi's unit, locked themselves in a bedroom and called police while Traoré could be heard shouting "Allahu Akbar" and declaring "I killed the Shaitan."

Police are reported to have initially gone to the wrong building, and once they arrived at the correct address they delayed entering while awaiting an elite unit, during which further calls to the emergency line reported a woman screaming. Paris prosecutor François Molins opened an investigation for deliberate homicide on 7 April 2017, stating that an antisemitic motive could not yet be confirmed but would be examined. On 9 April 2017, between 1,000 and 2,000 people marched in Halimi's memory in an event organized by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF).

For several months, government officials and parts of the French press were criticized by public figures, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, for hesitating to describe the killing as antisemitic, despite Halimi being the only Jewish resident of the building. Traoré, who had prior convictions for violent offenses but no history of psychiatric hospitalization, was charged on 12 July 2017 with intentional homicide and forcible confinement. He acknowledged the facts of the killing to an investigating judge while denying an antisemitic motive, saying he had felt "possessed" and attributing his state to heavy cannabis use, which toxicology testing confirmed was in his system.

In September 2017 the prosecutor formally characterized the killing as antisemitic, and in February 2018 the lead investigator acknowledged the same in writing. In July 2019, an examining magistrate ruled that Traoré was likely not criminally responsible for his actions because heavy cannabis use had induced a temporary psychosis recognized under French law as "bouffée délirante"; the Paris Court of Appeal affirmed this finding later that year. In 2021, France's Court of Cassation, the country's final court of appeal, upheld the ruling, closing the domestic criminal process without a trial or conviction. Halimi's family's lawyers said they intended to pursue the case before the European Court of Human Rights.

President Emmanuel Macron publicly criticized the appellate finding in December 2019 and, after the 2021 Court of Cassation ruling, called for French law on criminal responsibility to be revised. A parliamentary report released in January 2022 concluded that police, the psychiatric hospital, and the court system had not acted inappropriately in the case; the report passed by a narrow 7-5 vote and drew criticism from Jewish organizations and media. The case was widely compared to the murder of Ilan Halimi (no relation), which had occurred eleven years earlier, and to the murder of Mireille Knoll less than a year later.