Faked attack

last updated 8 January 2015

Paris

A young mother whose report of an anti-Semitic attack dominated French headlines this week has admitted she made the story up. The woman, 23, told police that six North African men robbed her on a subway train as she was traveling with her infant. Mistakenly thinking she was Jewish, she said, the men called her epithets and scrawled swastikas on her stomach. Anti-Semitic violence has become so common in France that the story seemed all too plausible. But police became suspicious after they could not find a single witness and files showed the woman had a habit of filing false mugging claims. Political leaders said the hoax should not weaken the resolve to counter anti-Semitism. If the attack had been real, said legislator Dominique Strauss-Kahn, “it would be the 10th or 20th attack of its type.”