On the night of February 21st, 1995, Robert Lagier, an unemployed construction worker, and two fellow members of the extreme right-wing National Front (FN) headed for the immigrant neighbourhoods of north Marseille to put up election campaign posters for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party's leader and its presidential candidate. Under a smiling image of Mr Le Pen, the poster said: "With Le Pen, Three million Immigrants Sent Home".
At a traffic intersection, the three FN men saw 10 young men racing past them. The youths had just left a rap music rehearsal and carried instruments and sound equipment. They were running to a bus stop on the far side of the intersection - because they did not want to miss the last bus home.
Robert Lagier removed his 22calibre pistol from an ankle holster, stood in the middle of the road, and took aim. He hit Ibrahim Ali (17), a Frenchman born in the Comoro Islands, in the back with a dum-dum bullet. It exploded in the young man's heart.
For Ali's murder, Lagier, now 66 and dying of prostate cancer, was this week sentenced to 15 years in prison; his friend, Marco d'Ambrosio, who fired several shots from his 7.65-calibre pistol but did not hit anyone, got 10 years. Pierre Giglio, the third FN man, received a two-year sentence for carrying a gun in his car.
Lagier fabricated a story that the adolescents had thrown stones at his car, but police found no dents in the vehicle and no stones in the intersection. He also claimed he thought they were attacking Giglio. The National Front backed the three men completely, founding the "DGL Association" (after their initials) to "help our prisoners".
Bruno Megret, the man most likely to succeed the ageing Le Pen as party leader, made their defence a personal crusade. A few hours after the murder, Megret announced that the three had been "violently attacked by about 15 Comorians".
At the trial, Megret refused to apologise to the victim's family on the ground that "there is no collective responsibility in French law", but he praised the FN members as "average Frenchmen" who "deserve respect and dedicate themselves to others, to love of their country and defence of their people."
Ibrahim Ali was a good student who enjoyed music and laughter. "It's true, we are black," his aunt said at the trial. "But we have the right to live. We came to France because we wanted freedom, and we found misfortune."
Lagier's grand-daughter Julie, now 16, testified against him. When she was eight, her grandfather took her to the firing range. "He told me it was to learn how to shoot melons," she told the court. "I didn't know what he meant by melons. He told me he meant Arabs."
The girl's mother and Lagier's former daughter-in-law, Elisabeth Bore, said she "never heard him say the word `Arab'. He always said bicot, bougnoule or melon" - all racist terms for Arabs.
The verdict in the Ibrahim Ali case was hailed by Gilbert Collard, the lawyer for the young man's friends, as "moral condemnation of the National Front".
The anti-racist group, MRAP, said the trial demonstrated "the lethal violence" of the National Front's ideology, constituting "a message that racist motives are henceforward incriminating".
The Ali case followed a similar trial last month, in which Mickael Freminet, a former skinhead, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the May 1st, 1995, murder of Brahim Bouraam, a Moroccan. Freminet and three friends had taken an FN-hired bus from Reims to central Paris for the party's annual May Day celebration. At least two had served as volunteers with the FN's "security service".
The four skinheads broke off from the tail-end of the demonstration to accost Bouraam on the banks of the Seine. In the words of the prosecutor, "the Seine water was brown that day, the current was violent - anyone would have realised it was an abyss, a terror". Mickael Freminet pushed Bouraam into the river and he drowned. But in this instance, the FN disowned its fledglings, asking one of them to destroy his membership card before he was arrested.
Bouraam's girlfriend, Alice Odiot, was to have met him on the riverbank that afternoon. She did not learn until the following day why her lover missed their appointment. "He was very respectful, attentive, against all forms of violence," she said of Bourram. When the accused man told her he was sorry, that he had not meant to kill him, Miss Odiot clasped her hands to her ears and fled the courtroom.
In separate cases at Le Havre, two skinheads have been convicted of drowning a Tunisian after attending a Bruno Megret rally several years ago.
Last week, three other skinheads were arrested for the 1990 murder of a youth from Mauritius. They forced their victim to swallow a mixture of beer and caustic soda, then threw him in the harbour. He clambered out of the water, but died three weeks later of internal burns.