Nanny charged with trying to poison French Jewish family

French prosecutors have indicted a 42-year-old Algerian woman for allegedly trying to poison the Jewish family that had employed her, the Le Parisien newspaper reported on Monday.

The defendant is scheduled to appear before a judge in Nanterre near Paris on Tuesday for actions attributed to her in January 2024, and which were allegedly motivated by Jew-hatred, according to the report.

The defendant, identified only as “Leila Y.” in the French media, had worked for the family in Paris for two months under a false Belgian identity. In fact, she was under orders to leave France, a measure often employed against those found to have overstayed their visa permit. The family had three children, then aged 2, 5 and 7.

The defendant has been charged with “administering a harmful substance resulting in incapacity exceeding eight days, committed on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality or religion,” Le Parisien reported.

The woman who employed her had sensed abnormalities in various products, including wine, juice, bread and even a makeup kit that caused her skin irritations, the report said.

The woman’s 5-year-old daughter told her that she’d seen the nanny deposit a soap-like liquid into a wine bottle, prompting the mother to confront Leila Y., the newspaper reported, based on court papers. The nanny allegedly responded by saying, “I knew I never should have been working for a Jew,” and brought up financial grievances.

Police analyzed the products that the nanny had allegedly tampered with and found that they had indeed been poisoned, although the foreign agents introduced to the products were not lethal, the analysis showed.

The nanny was placed under arrest in February 2024.

Gilles-William Goldnadel, a former member of the CRIF executive board of French Jewry and a prominent lawyer who’s represented many victims of antisemitic hate crimes, told the Radio J station on Monday: “Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m astonished. Hate had been worked up to a fever pitch, notably by the France Unbowed [far-left] party, tied to the Islamist movement, until it has been infused, and this is the infusion.”

Goldnadel recalled the murder of four Jews in 2012 in Toulouse and the murder of four hostages in a kosher market in Paris in 2015 by Islamists. “We live in a country where Jews, Jewish children, have been murdered, butchered. And this is a reminder of this reality, perpetrated by foreigners or Islamists,” he said.

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