"On the Quran of Mecca, I will come with an explosive belt to your synagogue and blow everything up." It is a chilling telephone message that the leaders of the Berith Chalom synagogue, located rue Saint-Lazare, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, discovered Saturday on their answering machine, without requiring any evacuation of the site.
This Tuesday, the head of the place of worship took the road to the police station of the ninth arrondissement to file a complaint, officially. The latter had already made contact with the police, Saturday, by phone. The investigators had not dragged on. The criminal office of the Paris prosecutor's office had been seized in flagrance. At the police station on rue Chauchat (IXe), the police immediately asked the SFR operator to identify the owner of the line who made the threats. Officials geolocated him in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), where he lives.
"These threats are part of a context of Jewish holidays including Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah," says Yonathan Arfi. According to the president of Crif (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France) and a Parisian elected official, other threats targeting other synagogues - phone calls, emails, anti-Semitic insults - have been made in recent weeks. Yonathan Arfi contextualizes these calls "symptomatic of the anti-Semitism of recent times", which could, according to him, have been fueled by the threats of attack emanating from Al-Qaeda, made a fortnight ago, and explicitly targeting France and Sweden.
The threatening voice message left Friday on the answering machine of the synagogue on rue Saint-Lazare referenced, in a confused way, to Samuel Paty, the teacher of a college in Val-d'Oise beheaded by a radicalized Islamist for showing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed to his students. The author of the threats also referred to Palestine.
"All means are implemented to protect places of worship," says Delphine Bürkli, the mayor (Horizon) of the ninth arrondissement, who is in contact with the president of the synagogue. Nothing must be missed. »
The Paris prosecutor's office has opened an investigation for "threats of death materialized aggravated by the fact that they were committed because of religion" and "threats of destruction dangerous to people". The first investigations were entrusted to the police station of the IXth.