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Besides Yalda, several women have been arrested in an investigation into their role in botched efforts to lure other Jewish men into “honey traps”.

“He wanted a Jew,” a girl called Audrey told police, referring to Youssouf Fofana, the charismatic leader of the Barbarians, who was listed by the girls in their telephone directories as “Youssouf the barbarian”.

His choice of victims was based on two anti-semitic myths: that Jews are all rich and that they stick together. “They’re a big community,” Fofana told Audrey. “United and willing to pay.”

Audrey lost her nerve after reeling in two targets, one of whom was rejected when it turned out that he was not a Jew. She infuriated Fofana when she failed to follow up on her second victim. “When you start something you have to finish it,” he shouted.

Tifenn, a small, dark 19-year-old from Brittany, was also a procurer in this macabre operation. She described herself as being less “sexy” than the other girls and said that her role was limited to putting prettier school friends in touch with Fofana.

Like Audrey and Yalda, Tifenn attended a boarding school on the outskirts of Paris that was funded by social services. Yalda had been followed by children’s courts and was receiving counselling: at 13 she had been the victim of une tournante — as the commonplace ritual of gang rape has come to be known in the suburbs.

Other examples of savagery in these lawless enclaves were exposed on Friday at the trial of Jamal Derrar. He was accused of burning 17-year-old Sohane Benziane to death in 2002 in Vitry-Sur-Seine, where last year’s orgy of suburban rioting began, after she defied his order to stay away from his “territory”.

“You’re frightened, huh?” he jeered, according to testimony, after pouring petrol over her head and taking out his cigarette lighter. He lit the lighter several times in front of her face to torment her to tears until finally setting her alight.

“It is barbarism,” Kahina, the victim’s sister, said last week. “I want barbarism rejected. It is becoming so banal. We are not in a war. I refuse to live in a country that cannot defend its citizens.”

Another girl, 18-year-old Chahrazad Belayni, was doused with petrol by a suitor and set alight in November last year. She remains in a coma. In Marseilles in 2004, Ghofrane Haddaoui, a 23-year-old woman from the suburbs, was stoned to death by a gang of youths.

The choice of Halimi as a victim because he was Jewish was a particularly distressing component of the crime for a nation whose anti-semitic past included wartime collaboration in the transfer of Jews to the death camps.

France has the biggest Muslim and Jewish populations of any European country and in some suburbs it is not uncommon to see anti-Jewish grafitti. “We’ve got blacks and Arabs in one camp and then it is the Jews in the other,” said Mamadou Menibe, a young man of west African origin from Vitry-Sur-Seine.

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France claims that violent attacks against Jews began rising abruptly in France at the start of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000.

Some experts say it has been fuelled by Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a popular comedian who blames Jews for the suffering of blacks and was found guilty last month of incitement to racial hatred.

The hostility has led thousands of French Jews to move to Israel in the past five years, including about 3,300 last year, the highest number in 35 years.

So obsessed was Fofana, the Barbarians’ leader, with targeting Jews that he had established which shops were Jewish by checking which of them closed during Jewish holidays.

When he met Yalda he was impressed. “With you,” he said, “I can do wonders. With your physique you’ll make a fortune . . . all the boys will fall into the trap.”

He offered her £3,000 to approach Halimi in his shop and lure him to a meeting. She got Halimi’s number and rang him up to ask him out on a date.

She told her friend Tifenn that she found Halimi “friendly” and “cute”. After they met in a cafe, she invited him back to her fictitious flat on the other side of the ring road. The Barbarians were lying in wait.

Some commentators seem traumatised by too much reality, upbraiding the foreign media for painting “la belle France” in an unflattering light. But the truth is ugly, particularly when it comes to the barbarians camped at the gate.

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