Investigations into the murder of Mirelle Kanol, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor in her Paris apartment, has not provided evidence to suggest that the crime was motivated by anti-Semitism according to SPCJ, the official security unit of the French Jewish community. During the Holocaust, Kanol escaped the French police’s roundup of Jews to be deported to Nazi death camps. According to the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, Kanol had been stabbed at least 11 times; her body and apartment were set on fire.
Police have a 29-year-old man in custody in connection with Kanol’s murder. Kanol’s granddaughter, Noa Goldfarb of Herzliya, Israel, wrote on Facebook that her grandmother was murdered “by a Muslim neighbor she knew well, who made sure to set fire to her home and left us not even one object, a letter, a photograph, to remember her by.”
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