FRANCE: A group of young men attacked a mother travelling with her child on a Parisian suburban railway, chopping off her hair and drawing swastikas on her stomach in the latest anti-Semitic incident to unsettle France.
President Chirac led a chorus of condemnations from across the spectrum of France's political elite yesterday, expressing his horror at the "shameful attack", which came just a day after he launched a nationwide campaign to stem a rise in racist assaults.
Mr Dominique de Villepin, the interior minister, said police had been ordered to speed up attempts to find the men responsible for this "vile" incident.
The attack happened around 9.30 a.m. on Friday, when the young woman was on a train on the northern outskirts of the capital with her 13-month-old child. A group of six youths, aged between 15 and 20, snatched her bag and rifled through it, seizing on her identity card, printed with her former address in the 16th arrondissment of Paris.
She told police that they shouted: "Only Jews live in the 16th." The men, who were armed with knives, then pushed her violently, cut off some of her hair ("to keep as a souvenir", French newspapers reported), and drew several swastikas on her stomach with a black felt-tip pen. Police said the 23-year-old, whose identity has not been revealed, was not Jewish.
The other passengers in the carriage stood by watching, but none of them came to help her, according to the report she made to the police. Her baby was knocked from its push-chair during the attack, but neither she nor the child was badly hurt.
The men left the train with her handbag. Police said some of the men appeared to be north African, suggesting the assault may have been one of a growing number of incidents provoked by the export of tensions over the Middle East crisis to France, which has the largest Muslim population in western Europe ( five million) and the largest Jewish population (600,000).
Mr Chirac warned that France needed to abandon its "indifference and passivity" towards the rising climate of intolerance.