Kobili Traore, a 29-year old native of Mali who is accused of murdering Sarah Halimi, a 65-year old Jewish physician and kindergarten teacher in Paris in 2017, might not be criminally responsible for his actions because he smoked marijuana prior to the attack, a French judge has ruled.
According to Le Parisien, the investigating judge said that there are "plausible reasons" to believe that Traore was not responsible for his actions at the time of the attack, and dismissed the alleged anti-semitic nature of the crime.
Since his arrest, Traore has had three psychiatric examinations, amid claims that he smokes up to 15 cannabis joints per day. While none of the examinations claim that he developed a mental illness due to his drug use, the most recent found that that drug use was a factor in his inability to control his behavior.
#SarahHalimi - Crif PR @FrancisKalifat Op-Ed: "The judges believe that there are "possible reasons" to think that the discernment of the suspect was "abolished" at the time of the facts. If it is unsurprising, this decision remains hardly justifiable."
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) 16 июля 2019 г.
-> https://t.co/9PN181Zee5 pic.twitter.com/CyssYlVUqR
Traore admitted to the killing back in 2017, but he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and was therefore never convicted of the murder.
Francis Kalifat, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), said that the ruling was “unsurprising but hardly justifiable”, adding that he now intends to appeal it in order to try and make Traore stand trial.
In 2017, Traore allegedly spent hours beating up Halimi before throwing her out of a window while shouting “Allah” and calling her a “demon”. The victim’s daughter said he called her a “dirty Jewess” two years prior to murdering her mother, according to the Jewish Times.
