FRANCE must confront its dark side this week when 28 members of a gang called the Barbarians go on trial in Paris for murdering a Jewish mobile phone salesman.

The killing of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, who was held to ransom for three weeks on a council estate in the grim Parisian suburbs, sickened a country haunted by a history of anti-semitism and wartime collaboration with the Nazis.

Relatives of the victim last week expressed indignation at the defence’s attempts to cast doubt on claims that Youssouf Fofana, leader of the gang, had chosen to kidnap Halimi in 2006 because he was Jewish.

“We’re shocked that there is even any debate about it,” said Anne-Laure, one of Halimi’s sisters. She noted that Fofana, who insisted on gang members calling him “Osama”, had often insulted Jews and sung verses from the Koran in between ransom demands over the telephone.

He allegedly told his accomplices that he wanted to kidnap a Jew because the Jewish community was rich, would stick together and would pay a big ransom.

“My son died because of that prejudice, just like millions of Jews before him,” wrote Ruth Halimi in a recent book about the ordeal in which she compared the kidnapping with that of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist beheaded by Muslim extremists in 2002.

After several previous attempts at kidnapping Jews and extorting money from Jewish doctors, Fofana employed an attractive schoolgirl as “bait” to lure Halimi to a meeting in the suburbs. He was set upon by the Barbarians whose members included blacks, Arabs and whites from Portugal and France.

Ruth Halimi complained in her book that police told her not to worry. “You don’t kidnap someone to kill them,” she was told. “They won’t kill your son.”

The kidnappers initially asked for £450,000 to be transferred to them electronically. The family was advised by police to ask for a face-to-face meeting before paying any money, but negotiations kept foundering.

The kidnappers were torturing Halimi - for their amusement, it seems - with acid, cigarette burns and cardboard cutters. When they eventually tired of the negotiations, they stabbed him several times in the body and throat and dumped him by the side of the road. He died in an ambulance.

Fofana fled to the Ivory Coast, from where he continued to taunt Halimi family members over the telephone until he was arrested. Just as shocking as the brutality was the fact that so many people knew about it and failed to tell the police. The girl who had been used in the “honey trap” told several friends about the kidnapping, but none came forward.

One of the gang members who did not want Halimi to be killed told his father what was happening. He advised the boy to keep quiet.

Some 160 witnesses will be called to the stand in a trial which, to the disappointment of the victim’s family, is expected to be closed to the public on the grounds that most of the defendants were minors when the crimes were committed.

The trial will focus attention on rising attacks on Jews over the past few years, during which thousands have emigrated to Israel. Ruth Halimi had her son’s body disinterred in 2007 so that his remains could be reburied in Israel.

“You will never be able to hurt him any more,” she wrote in her book, addressing the killers. “I took him away from here because one day you will be free and you would have been able to come and spit on his tomb.”

The desecration of Jewish graveyards has become a common crime in France.

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