PARIS (EJP)--- According to police preliminary investigation, Youssouf Fofana, the man who masterminded the kidnapping and murder of the 23-year-old Jewish Parisian Ilan Halim in 2006, executed personally his hostage.
RTL television reported that the investigation has now ended and that the trial of Fofana and his accomplices could take place before the end of 2008.
Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old mobile phone salesman, went missing in Paris in January 2006.
After being lured by a young woman from the mobile phone shop where he worked, he was held captive for more than three weeks in a Paris suburb.
Authorities found him naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks from cigarettes near railroad tracks south of Paris on February 13, 2006.
He died on the way to the hospital, having bled to death from stab wounds to his neck.
Halimi’s abductors, a dangerous gang called the "Barbarians" and led by Fofana, a 25-year-old French petty criminal of Ivorian origin, had tortured him while demanding a ransom from his family and the Jewish community.
The grisly anti-Semitic crime shocked France and its 600,000-strong Jewish community.
On 26 February 2006, tens of thousands of people protesting racism and anti-Semitism held marches in France in memory of Ilan.
After two years of investigation, magistrate Corinne Goetzman came to the conclusion that Fofana, who called himself the "brain of the barbarians," ordered a young pretty woman to target Halimi because he was Jewish and because they presumed Jews were wealthy.
Fofana, who was arrested in March 2006 in the Ivory Coast and extradited to France, thought that the Jewish community would stand by Halimi.
After initial reluctance, French authorities had said they believed anti-Semitism was behind te gang’s motives.
The investigation also shows that violence inflicted on Ilan Halimi intensified with the time: the more the ransom moved away, the more the kidnappers beat their victim.
For the magistrate, it is Fofana in person who executed his hostage in Sainte-Geneviève-des Bois. Ilan Halimi was stabbed twice at the throat, sprayed with petrol and then ignited.
Around thirty people are prosecuted but two of Fofana’s accomplices are still at large.
In his cell, Fofana does not collaborate with the investigation. He denies everything.
Paranoiac and aggressive, the “leader of the barbarians” is said to have already discouraged some forty lawyers.