The assailant was declared to be not criminally responsible when the judges ruled he was undergoing a psychotic episode due to cannabis consumption, as established by an independent psychiatric analysis.

[4] Dr Sarah Attal-Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman who was a retired physician and mother of three children,[5] was asleep in her apartment when her 27-year old neighbor Kobili Traoré broke in and beat her with a phone and then his fists, leaving her body with several fractures.

[11][12][14] After throwing Halimi from a third-floor window, Traoré returned to the first apartment where the family, still cowering in a room and awaiting the police, again heard him praying aloud.

On 7 April 2017, prosecutor François Molins, who opened a case for deliberate homicide, declared that the killing could not at that time be considered as an antisemitic act but that this possibility would be explored by the investigators.

[29] The Times reported on 23 May 2017 that according to Jean-Alexandre Buchinger, an attorney for the victim's family, the killer ought to have been charged with "murder with antisemitism as an aggravating circumstance", and also that French Jewish groups were alleging that this had not been done out of fear of encouraging support for the National Front (France) party's election campaign.

[36] The Halimi killing generated significant public reaction in France and worldwide, with intellectual, media, political and Jewish communal voices demanding that antisemitism and Islamist terrorism be investigated as possible motives, and accusing both the French government and press of a coverup.

[4][12][11] On 9 April 2017, between 1,000 and 2,000 people joined a march in memory of Halimi, organized by the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), which asked that "the whole truth" of the case be made public.

[37][38] Paris prosecutor François Molins received representatives of the Jewish community and attempted to reassure them that the issue was not one of antisemitism, but that the possibility was being investigated.

"[4] Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, a French academic, on 25 May 2017 published an open letter in the newspaper Atlantico titled "From Ilan to Sarah Halimi, France unworthy".

She addressed it to Gérard Collomb, appointed Minister of the Interior a week earlier, and denounced France as a "country where it has once again become possible to assassinate Jews without our countrymen being overly disturbed".

[41] Seventeen intellectuals, including Michel Onfray, Élisabeth Badinter, Jacques Julliard, Georges Bensoussan, Alain Finkielkraut and Marcel Gauchet, in the lead article of Le Figaro on 2 June 2017 asked that light be shed "on the death of this French woman of Jewish religion killed at the cries of 'Allah Akbar'".

They denounced what they called "the denial of the real" and the fact that "this crime of a rare barbarism", occurring in the middle of a presidential campaign, "received little attention from the media".

[11][42] On 5 June 2017, Bernard-Henri Levy stressed the fact that, although Sarah Halimi was tortured and defenestrated at the cry of "Allahu Akbar", justice and the press "are reluctant to pronounce the word 'antisemitism'".

[46] On 13 July 2017, the CRIF posted a newsletter on the topic noting that the killing had occurred a hundred days before, that the suspect was still under examination for voluntary homicide, and that the aggravating factor of antisemitism had been dropped.

[47] In May 2019, Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Europe complained that Traoré was still considered unfit for trial, asserted that the nature of the crime was irrefutably antisemitic, and said that "If justice is perverted and murder excused due to drug addiction, this sets a precedent for every drunk driver to be similarly acquitted.

"[58] Years later, in the process of raising her children together with her late husband, a psychologist, she decided to apply for an open position as director of a government-funded preschool that "became famous across Paris.