The trial of a 55-year-old man accused of killing his Jewish neighbor by throwing him from the 17th floor of a residential building is set to open Sunday in a court near Lyon, with judges expected to consider whether the crime was motivated by antisemitism.
The defendant is charged with the murder of René Hajaj, 89, who was killed in May 2022. Hajaj’s body was found at the foot of the apartment building where he lived. Investigators quickly arrested a neighbor who lived on the 17th floor and later admitted to pushing Hajaj from his balcony.
The defendant has acknowledged the act but claims it was committed in self-defense. He has denied any antisemitic intent, saying he was experiencing a paranoid psychotic episode at the time and believed the victim was trying to strangle him.
The question of motive — and whether antisemitism played a decisive role — is expected to be central to the proceedings in the coming days.
Two psychiatric evaluations found that the defendant’s judgment was impaired at the time of the killing but not abolished, meaning he remains criminally responsible under French law.
Jewish organizations, including the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, have joined the case as civil parties. They argue the crime was clearly antisemitic and have drawn parallels to the 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi, another elderly Jewish woman murdered by a neighbor in Paris.
“He was a neighbor who knew the victim well. He knew he was Jewish, and he attacked him because he was Jewish,” said an attorney representing several of the civil parties, calling the case strikingly similar to the Halimi affair.
In that case, France’s highest court ruled in 2019 that the attacker, who killed Halimi after consuming cannabis, could not stand trial because his drug-induced psychosis rendered him criminally irresponsible — a decision that sparked outrage in France’s Jewish community and beyond.
The Lyon court will now have to determine whether antisemitism constituted an aggravating factor in Hajaj’s killing, a finding that could significantly affect the outcome of the trial.