French Police Arrest Woman For Hoax Anti-Semitic Attack

PARIS, July 14 (IslmOnline.net & News Agencies) - A French woman, who claimed she was the subject of an "anti-Semitic" attack by six youths of North African appearance on a train in the suburbs of Paris, was taken into police custody Tuesday, July 13, after admitting to having invented the assault story.

French police said they had detained the 23-year-old woman after questioning her for a second time about the alleged incident on July 9, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

"The first declarations of the young woman reveal that her accusations were lies and that she had been making it all up," the public prosecutor's office in the Paris suburb of Pontoise said late Tuesday in a statement.

"There are elements that have cast a large shadow of doubt on her statements," said Paris police chief Jean-Paul Proust, adding he could not draw any conclusions until investigators wrapped up their probe.

Investigators said closed-circuit cameras at the station north of Paris did not show the six youths and despite government pleas for witnesses to come forward, no one had yet surfaced to corroborate the woman's story.

Railway personnel at the ticket office where the woman said she reported the affair could remember nothing about it, investigators said.

A 28-year-old man told AFP he had seen the woman on the platform of the station where she said she boarded the train before the attack.

He said her clothes were already torn and she was crying, adding: "I asked her if she wanted help and she said no."

Reporting the invented story to police, the woman, identified only as Marie-Leonie L. in the press, had claimed that six youths had slashed her clothes and drawn swastikas on her stomach after mistaking her for a Jew.

She said her alleged attackers believed her to be Jewish after discovering that she had once lived in the French capital's upmarket 16th district.

"Only Jews live in the 16th arrondissement," she quoted one of the alleged attackers as having said.

She had also alleged that they swiped her bag and tipped over the baby carriage with her 13-month-old child inside.

She said some 20 people had been in the train car at the time of the incident, prompting nationwide outrage that no one had come to her aid.

Failing to help a person in danger is punishable by up to five years in jail, according to AFP.

A police source told AFP on Tuesday that the woman had filed six prior complaints in recent years -- one for theft and one for sexual assault -- but that the alleged criminals had never been found.

Now, she could face up to six months in prison and a 7,500-euro ($9,200) fine if convicted.

Justice Needed

French President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday, July 14, dismissed the hoax attack as "regrettable."

"Whenever there is manipulation, the manipulator must be punished," Chirac said during his annual Bastille Day televised interview broadcast live on TF1 and France 2 television.

Even the woman's mother joined the criticism chorus.

"It's not right that she has put France in such a state. There were demonstrations for her. I don't accept this kind of thing, and so I want justice to be done," the unidentified mother told RTL radio.

The mother said "we knew she was fragile" and that she had already received psychiatric care.

"You can't treat someone against their will."

Some of France's political elite, which had initially rallied around the woman, seemed to be backing away on Tuesday.

"I hope there's not going to be too much doubt about this affair," the Socialist president of the Paris region, Jean-Paul Huchon, whispered to state secretary for victims' rights Nicole Guedj in an aside recorded and broadcast by France 2 television.

Double Standards

The purported assault sparked outrage across France and sharp condemnations from across the political spectrum.

Pascal Boniface, the director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Studies, said the extensive coverage the hoax had received in French media demonstrated a double-standard approach in dealing with racist attacks in the European country.

"At a time when anti-Semitism crimes soar, we also find another kind of racism targeting the younger generations of immigrants, which is poorly covered by media," Boniface told IslamOnline.net.

"More and more, French citizens of Arab descent who are cruelly treated by police don’t receive slightest media attention, which does great injustice to this community."

Several mosques in France have recently come under a string of racist attacks and arsons.

Mosques and Muslim graves in two cemeteries have been defaced with swastikas and Neo-Nazi slogans last month, while gunshots were fired at a mosque in northern France.

On June 27, racist slogans have been sprayed on the wall of a mosque near Paris.

The mosque in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, was sprayed with three giant inscriptions, telling Muslims to "go home" and extolling the policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the xenophobic far-right National Front party.

Last March, two mosques were hit by arson attacks in the two cities of Seynod and Annecy.

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