Woman ‘invented’ swastika attack

A FRENCH woman who alleged she was the victim of an anti-Semitic attack that shocked France yesterday told police she made up the incident, a judicial source said.

The 23-year-old woman and her male companion were detained after police called them in to discuss the alleged attack, in which she said six knife-wielding youths of Arab and African origin had daubed swastikas on her stomach on a Paris train.

“She admitted to inventing the whole thing,” the judicial source said.

The woman, identified only as Marie L, had alleged the attackers wrongly thought she was a Jew and also toppled a pram carrying her 13-month-old baby.

When news of Friday’s alleged attack emerged, French President Jacques Chirac and other leading politicians condemned it.

But anti-racism group Mrap criticised officials for being too quick to blame youths of Arab and African origin.

“(Mrap) strongly condemns the irresponsible comments of people who took advantage of this invention to once more use anti-Semitism as a tool against a specific group of people,” it said.

Government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said a rising trend of anti-Semitic attacks was “a genuine evil” in France, even if the woman’s case might not be real.

More racist and anti-Semitic acts occurred in France in the first half of 2004 than in all of 2003, official figures show.

French media had cast doubt on the woman’s allegation, saying she had filed six unfounded reports of attacks in the past five or six years.

The daily newspaper Le Figaro quoted an unidentified source close to the woman as saying she was a “mythomaniac”.