Killing of Sarah Halimi

Sarah Halimi was a retired French doctor and schoolteacher who was attacked and killed in her apartment on 4 April 2017. Circumstances surrounding the killing—including the fact that Halimi was Jewish, and that the assailant (Kobili Traoré) had shouted Allahu akbar during the attack and afterward proclaimed "I killed the Shaitan"—cemented the public perception, particularly among the French Jewish community, that it was a stark example of antisemitism in modern France.

For several months the government and some of the media hesitated to label the killing as antisemitic, drawing criticism from public figures such as Bernard-Henri Lévy. The government eventually acknowledged an antisemitic motivation for the killing. The assailant was declared to be not criminally responsible when the judges ruled he was undergoing a psychotic episode due to cannabis consumption, as established by an independent psychiatric analysis. The decision was appealed to the supreme Court of Cassation, who in 2021 upheld the lower court's ruling.

The killing has been compared to the murder of Mireille Knoll in the same arrondissement less than a year later, and to the murder of Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah Halimi) eleven years earlier.