Macron has confirmed Mireille Knoll was killed because she was Jewish

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During a national tribute to Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, a gendarme killed in an Islamic attack that took place just hours before Mrs Knoll’s death last Friday, Mr Macron said: “Mireille Knoll was killed because she was Jewish.”

Mrs Knoll, 85, escaped being deported to Auschwitz during World War Two, when 13,000 Jews were rounded up in July 1942 by French police acting in tandem with the Nazis in the city’s Velodrome d’Hiver cycling track.

She was found dead with 11 stab wounds at her apartment in Paris’ working-class 11th arrondissement. Her home was set alight after the attack and her body badly burned.

One of the two men arrested over the attack was a long-time neighbour who had recently been released from jail, where he had served an eight-month sentence for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl.