Ilan Halimi - Timeline of The Crime

Timeline of The Crime

According to press reports based on information from French criminal investigation authorities, as of 25 February 2006 the crime is believed to have happened as follows:

• On 20 January, Halimi was lured by an attractive seventeen year old girl named Yalda, of French-Iranian origin, to an apartment block in the Parisian banlieues.
• There Halimi was overwhelmed by a youth gang and kept prisoner for twenty-four days.
• Halimi was initially guarded by four teenagers who were promised €5,000. During the three-week period, his kidnappers, at least 19 of them, tortured him by beating him all over his body, especially his testicles, completely wrapping his head in duct tape, except for his mouth, so he could breathe and eat through a straw, stabbing him, burning his body and face with lighters and cigarettes, in order to extract a ransom of initially 450,000 Euros from his family.
• Halimi was found naked, handcuffed, and bound with nylon rope to a tree about 40 yards inside a woodlot from a railway outside Paris, on February 13. A list of cases of the 'bystander effect' reported that more than 80% of his body had been burned with acid, as well as gasoline (possibly to destroy evidence of his captors' DNA), to the point that he was difficult to recognize. He had severe contusions, blood blisters, and hematomas covering most of his body, to the point that he was more blue than flesh-colored, multiple broken bones, one ear and one big toe missing, and his testicles looked like "blackened oranges." Halimi died en route to a hospital.
• In the subsequent days, French police arrested 21 persons in connection with the crime, including the woman used as bait. The leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana, fled to his parents' homeland of Côte d'Ivoire, where he was arrested on 23 February. Fofana was extradited to France on 4 March 2006.