French Woman Admits She Made up Anti-Semitic Attack
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James Joyner | Tuesday, July 13, 2004 |
AFP/YahooNews - French woman admits she made up anti-Semitic attack
A French woman who claimed last week she had been the victim of a vicious anti-Semitic attack admitted to police that she had made up the entire incident, and was detained for falsely reporting a crime. After being questioned for a second time by investigators about the alleged incident on July 9, which shocked France and shed a negative light on government efforts to stamp out anti-Semitism, the woman admitted she had lied.
The 23-year-old had initially told police that a gang of six youths had accosted her on a suburban train outside Paris, slashing her clothes and drawing swastikas on her stomach after mistaking her for a Jew. “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 said in a statement. The woman admitted to “having made knife cut marks on herself, cut off a lock of her own hair and drawn swastikas on her body,” it said.
Doubts had mounted Tuesday over her claim after no one came forward to corroborate the story, despite the fact that she said some 20 people had witnessed the alleged incident. She changed her story Tuesday, too, to say that she and her 13-month-old child had been assaulted outside the train, but finally admitted that she had totally invented the attack, police said. The woman has been placed in preventive detention for falsely reporting a crime, state prosecutor Xavier Salvat told AFP. She could face up to six months in prison and a 7,500-euro (9,200-dollar) fine if tried and convicted.
It boggles the mind.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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