The fate of the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll shook France.

The frail, defenseless woman was killed with eleven stab wounds in her Paris apartment in March 2018 because she was Jewish.

The anti-Semitic motive of the two defendants was at the center of the criminal trial in Paris, which ended on Wednesday after two weeks.

According to the newspaper Le Monde, the 32-year-old main defendant is imprisoned for life, and the seven-year-old co-defendant is imprisoned for 15 years.

The perpetrator's mother was sentenced to three years, two of which were suspended, for destruction of evidence.

She doesn't have to go to jail, she has to wear an electronic ankle cuff.

Michaela Wiegel

Political correspondent based in Paris.

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For public prosecutor Jean-Christophe Muller, the murder of the Holocaust survivor marks the dramatic end of good neighborly relations between Jewish and Muslim citizens in Paris.

If the process is to serve anything, it is to create a new awareness of the challenge posed by anti-Semitism that emanates from Islamist ideology, stressed the prosecutor.

A "particularly barbaric murder"

The perpetrator and the victim were no strangers to each other.

The hatred was not caused by ignorance of the religion and living conditions of the other.

"They lived in the same society, in the same block of flats, under similar socio-economic conditions," said Muller.

One has to analyze this fact thoroughly.

Anti-Semitism has flared up again and again in the history of France.

From then on, the legislation integrated the motif of anti-Semitism.

The prosecutor pleaded for the anti-Semitic motivation of the main defendant Yacine Mihoub to be considered as aggravating the punishment.

He demanded life imprisonment and subsequent security detention of 22 years for the now 32-year-old man who “committed a particularly barbaric murder”.

Although Mihoub denied to the last that he had attacked the Parkinson's sufferer with the knife, the prosecutor saw the guilt as proven.

"Mihoub is lying," said Muller.

The changing descriptions of the course of events were not conclusive.

He referred to the prejudices expressed by Mihoub against Jews, who are all rich, who control the media and politics.

In his detention cell, Mihoub had written the name Amédy Coulibalys on the wall out of admiration, who had attacked a Jewish supermarket on the morning of January 9, 2015 and shot four French people of Jewish faith.

A glass of port before the murder

The prosecutor also demanded the maximum sentence for the mother of the main defendant, Zoulikha Khellaf, for destroying the evidence. He demanded three years of imprisonment without parole for the 59-year-old mother. She threw away the bottle of port, the glass and Mireille Knoll's mobile phone to make the evidence disappear. While the court followed the prosecutor in the case of the main culprit, the sentences for his mother and the accomplice were milder than required.

The sociable old lady had poured a glass of port wine for the neighbors in her apartment before he attacked her with a knife, presumably after an argument about Jews and money.

The prosecutor said that Khellaf's actions made it difficult to solve the crime.

Against the second defendant, the 26-year-old Alex Carrimbacus, he had requested 18 years imprisonment and a nine-year security sentence.

Carrimbacus did not commit the murder, but a particularly heinous form of theft.

He tried to rob Knoll, "a dead woman whose body was still warm." However, he did not steal much because there was little to steal.

He also gave Mihoub the lighter so that he could set the apartment on fire.

In a letter to Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, Mireille Knoll's two sons proposed that an educational project against anti-Semitism and racism be organized in all schools on the anniversary of their mother's death on March 23.

The murder case marks the end of a certain social indifference in the face of anti-Semitism.

Tens of thousands of French gathered in Paris for a “white march”.