An investigating judge was appointed on Tuesday to investigate the tags representing blue Stars of David, in Paris and its suburbs on October 31, said the Paris prosecutor, who does not exclude that this marking “was carried out at the express request of a person residing abroad”. “The investigation will now continue as part of a judicial investigation, both to identify the perpetrators and to analyze the intention that guided this operation,” said Laure Beccuau in a press release.
“The same team” is suspected of having carried out different markings of Stars of David in Paris and its suburbs “in a single trip”, explained Monday morning the capital’s prosecutor’s office, concerning these tags whose anti-Semitic nature is not established at this stage. Several dozen Stars of David were discovered on the morning of Tuesday October 31, tagged on the facades of buildings in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, but also in other places in Paris and the suburbs.
The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, denounced “despicable actions”, seeing, like many political figures, anti-Semitic acts.
An “atypical affair”
Initially, three investigations were opened in Bobigny, Nanterre and Paris, for damage to the property of others aggravated by the circumstance that it was committed due to origin, race, ethnicity or religion. . The three were finally grouped together in Paris, the capital’s prosecutor’s office said Monday morning.
“It appears, in fact, that the same team was able to carry out the different markings during a single journey. Investigations are continuing,” adds the public prosecutor. On Friday, this same source clarified that it “has not been established that this star has an anti-Semitic connotation, but this cannot be ruled out out of hand.” The public prosecutor said it was investigating “the intention underlying these tags, particularly with regard to the geopolitical context and its impact among the population in France”.
Sunday, on BFM-TV, the police prefect, Laurent Nuñez, spoke of an “atypical case compared to other anti-Semitic acts” and put the number of displays of this star at 250. He confirmed that a “team of “authors who seem to coordinate rather well” were in the investigators’ sights, and had “the desire for these stars to be seen”. The team reportedly targeted “certain buildings where no members of the Jewish community lived.”
According to him, 257 anti-Semitic acts have been recorded in the Paris metropolitan area and 90 people have been arrested since October 7, the start of the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
