The drama electrifies this end of the presidential campaign. Since Monday April 4, several candidates have taken a position on the death of Jérémie Cohen, on February 16 in Bobigny. Eric Zemmour devoted six tweets to him in twenty-four hours and evokes a “stifled” affair. On Tuesday, he received the victim’s father, at the request of the latter, indicates Le Figaro. Marine Le Pen, she even calls for a “parliamentary inquiry” on the subject. A complicated hypothesis, given that the principle of separation of powers prohibits parliamentarians from investigating an ongoing legal case. Valérie Pécresse asks that “all the light” be “shed without delay on this despicable lynching, which could be of an anti-Semitic nature”. Even the Elysée joined, Monday evening, the family of the victim.
Certain facts surrounding this case appear to be clearly established. We know that Jérémie Cohen, a slightly disabled 31-year-old man of Jewish faith, was run over by a tram in Bobigny on February 16 around 8 p.m. A video, which emerged on social networks on Monday, shows him being abused and beaten by a group of “fifteen to sixteen” individuals, says Franck Serfati, the family’s lawyer. Jérémie Cohen tries to escape them and crashes into the T1 tram. He died of his injuries that evening.
This Monday, the Bobigny prosecutor’s office confirmed that “the elements collected” by the investigators allow “to understand that, a few moments before the accident, the victim had suffered violence”. On March 29, a judicial investigation was opened for acts of intentional violence in a meeting that resulted in death without the intention of giving it. However, gray areas remain in the sequence of events, from the exact circumstances of the facts until the publication of the video which alerted several candidates for the presidential election.
Is this attack anti-Semitic?
It is not known, for the time being, if Jérémie Cohen was attacked because he was Jewish. In the absence of concordant elements in this sense, the investigating judge did not retain – for the moment – the religious reason as an aggravating circumstance. Uncertainty remains about the yarmulke that Jérémie Cohen would have worn at the time of the events. His family points out that a white yarmulke, found at the scene and belonging to him, was given to him. The video broadcast on Monday does not make it possible to discern whether Jérémie Cohen was wearing it at the time of his attack or if it was in his pocket.
“It does not appear from the testimonies collected so far that the attack was committed for discriminatory reasons. There is no evidence to date to establish with certainty whether or not the victim was wearing a yarmulke or not. at the time of the scene of violence,” said Eric Mathais, the prosecutor of Bobigny, during his press conference on Tuesday. No arrests have been made at this time.
Has the activism of the family revived this dossier?
In the days that followed this tragedy, two brothers of Jérémie Cohen, convinced that “something was wrong”, to use the words of Raphaël, one of the two brothers of the victim, with Radio Shalom, on March 31, filed calls for testimonials in neighborhood mailboxes. Franck Serfati clarified that this call “was not unsuccessful”. Understand that witnesses have sent oral elements, and also a video of the facts. “We had decisive testimony from a person who was able to film what happened. And that thing could relaunch the investigation in a very, very important way,” said Raphaël Cohen on Radio Shalom.
Does this mean that without this video, the case would have been buried? This is what Gérald Cohen, the victim’s father, clearly stated, still with Radio Shalom: “Why the family must conduct its own investigation and provide evidence to the police, to the IGPN, so that the investigation be reopened? If we had not called for witnesses concerning the massacre of my son, the investigation would have been dropped. In the same interview, Raphaël Cohen assures us that an investigator told him, a few days after February 16, that the investigation was moving “towards a traffic accident”.
In a grandstand at Current Values, Eric Zemmour, who was contacted by the family before the case became media, accredits the thesis defended by Gérald Cohen. He claims the family “fought alone for the truth to finally come out”. On the set of “Touche pas à mon poste”, the father of the victim also reveals that the day after the events, the police told him that Jérémie would have been “pursued” at the time of his accident. Element which tends to demonstrate that the attack was known to the investigators.
The Bobigny prosecution confirms this information. He explains that the violence suffered by Jérémie Cohen was “quickly” established and adds that “the hypothesis that the victim crossed the tracks to escape his attackers” was “naturally taken into account”. The Bobigny prosecutor further indicates that the choice to link the two facts in the same preliminary investigation was taken “following various contacts and an appointment with the lawyers of the victim’s family” as well as ” several investigation reports and exchanges with the investigators”.
Concretely, the Bobigny prosecutor’s office indicated that it had dismissed the investigation for “manslaughter” against the tram driver on February 22. Investigators received video of the assault on March 10. What happened between these two dates? The prosecutor specifies that the investigations continued during this interval. According to Mediaparta neighborhood police investigation has been carried out.
Eric Zemmour also accused, on Tuesday, the lawyer Patrick Klugman, initially approached by the family, of having wanted to “stifle the affair”. Comments deemed “defamatory” by the lawyer, who assumes to have been “hostile” to the “recovery” of this drama a few days before the elections.
How did the video of the assault emerge?
Following the testimony to Radio Shalom, the blog “Juifs Echos”, run by the confidential Collectif des vigilantes, published a first article on April 1. The identity media Fdesouche does the same, Saturday April 2. Then, on Monday, the images of the attack begin to spin on social networks. The first account to share this one-minute and six-second video is still the Vigilant Collective, through an Israeli platform, mykey.co.il, at 8:46 a.m. on the Telegram account “Jews Echos”, then at 9:54 on Facebook. A publication that will soon give a new dimension to this affair, the contours of which the media and the political class were unaware of at the time.
Contacted, Patrick H., the spokesperson for the Collectif des vigilantes, which he describes as a “Jewish movement that wants to denounce anti-Semitism”, confirms to us that it was he who broadcast this video first. He tells us about the genesis of this operation: “After the interview on Radio Shalom, I contacted the number that was given. I spoke with a member of the family. The next day, another number sent me the video on WhatsApp; but I never said that I would broadcast it. We decided to do it because one week before the presidential election, the representatives of our community, who also have the video, are trying to stifle the affair. They want to elect Macron or Pécresse. And what we want is justice for the Jews.”
Patrick H. adds that he himself integrated this spot on the Israeli site in question, which “belongs to a friend”. He would also have consulted with Fdesouche to widely relay the case: “We sent private messages with Fdesouche, in order to coordinate.” At 10:23 a.m. on Monday, the identity media’s Twitter account, which has more than 127,000 subscribers, relays the video. At 11:16 a.m., Eric Zemmour comments on the affair, soon followed by the entire political class.
The Vigilant Collective also has a blog, Juifsechos.wordpress.com, on which it sometimes posts pro-Zemmour content. On March 31, for example, he recounted the attack on Reconquête activists in Tours with the following message: “It seems that Zemmour is the extremist? In the meantime, here is the violence of some of his opponents…. Let’s imagine that a militant of Zemmour or MLP [NDLR : Marine Le Pen] act like he did… The guy in this video is a real psychopath. France under Macron… #impunity. The more I see this the more I know who to vote for.”
On this subject, Patrick H. specifies that if he “does not agree with everything that Eric Zemmour says, in particular on Pétain and Maurras, the collective agrees with what he says on anti-Semitism came from the Arab-Muslim world”. Patrick H. further adds that “most Jews will vote for Zemmour or Le Pen, because of anti-Semitism. The others always minimize the seriousness of the facts”.
Our interlocutor still claims to have received several requests from the family of Jérémie Cohen to have this shocking video removed. He assumes that he initially refused. “Our goal was for it to react at the highest level of the state. That’s why I didn’t want to remove the video. Now that everyone has reacted, it’s good,” he says. -he. A few minutes after our exchange, Patrick H. then called us back, after having exchanged with his “office”, to tell us that he had received laudatory messages from the entourage of Sarah Halimi, this sixty-something Jewish woman killed on April 4, 2017 for a motive anti-Semitic, three weeks before the first round of the presidential election, to general indifference. “One of his relatives said to me: ‘You avenged us’, it is very important”, assures the spokesperson. This precedent would also explain the Vigilant Collective’s desire for communication.