- 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.
-
- Her boyfriend has also been detained, police said.
-
- President Jacques Chirac, who had strongly condemned
the alleged incident, is sure to face questions about the case Wednesday,
when he participates in his traditional Bastille Day live televised interview.
-
- Last week, Chirac called for perpetrators of anti-Semitic,
racist and homophobic acts to face tough punishment, and has excluded racist
crimes from his annual July 14 clemency for prisoners.
-
- "The explosion in the number of racist and anti-Semitic
acts committed in our country these past few years is a reality that we
must fight," government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said Tuesday.
-
- The number of such incidents recorded in France -- home
to Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities -- soared in the first
half of the year, according to interior ministry figures.
-
- The woman had testified that her alleged attackers --
whom she described as black and Arab North Africans -- believed her to
be Jewish after discovering that she had once lived in the French capital's
upmarket 16th district.
-
- "Only Jews live in the 16th district," one
of the men was quoted as saying when the group purportedly assaulted the
woman, swiped her bag and tipped over the baby carriage with her baby inside.
-
- But investigators said closed-circuit cameras at the
station northeast of Paris where the woman said the attackers had left
the train did not show the six youths.
-
- Railway personnel at the ticket office where the woman
said she reported the affair could remember nothing about it, investigators
said.
-
- A 28-year-old man told AFP he had seen the woman on the
platform of the station where she said she boarded the train before the
attack.
-
- He said her clothes were already torn and she was crying,
adding: "I asked her if she wanted help and she said no."
-
- A police source told AFP on Tuesday that the woman had
filed six prior complaints in recent years -- among them one for theft
and one for sexual assault -- but that the alleged criminals had never
been found.
-
- Mouloud Aounit, president of the Movement against Racism
and for Friendship among Peoples (MRAP), demanded a public apology over
the incident.
-
- "We can't fight against one racism by making statements
that advocate another kind of racism," he said.
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