French authorities on Sunday arrested a Muslim resident of Lyon suspected of pushing his 90-year-old Jewish neighbor to his death.
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According to a report by the local Jewish newspaper Tribune Juive, René Hadjaj was pushed to his death from a 17th-story window in the residential building where he lived.
According to Le Progres, a local newspaper in Lyon, police believe Hadjaj and his neighbor had been embroiled in a dispute. While Hadjaj was wearing a kippah at the time of his death, police are not treating the murder as an antisemitic crime, according to the newspaper's report.
Despite police claims, Jewish community members are up in arms over the similarities in the case to the murder of Sarah Halimi, who was murdered when her Muslim neighbor threw her off her apartment balcony while shouting "Allah Akhbar" and "I killed the devil."
France prosecutors chose not to prosecute Halimi's killer, Kobili Traoré, accepting instead his attorney's claims the killing occurred while Kobili Traoré was in a state of temporary insanity brought on by marijuana use. He has since been hospitalized at a local psychiatric hospital in Paris.
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