French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that those who killed Lee Zeitouni in a hit-and-run car accident "are accountable" to justice but he stressed that France doesn’t extradite its nationals.
In his speech to the annual dinner of CRIF, the umbrella representative group of French Jewish organizations, on Wednesday night, Sarkozy raised the issue of the 25-year-old Israeli girl who was hit and killed by a car with two French tourists aboard, Claude Khayat and Eric Roubic, while she was walking to her workplace in Tel Aviv last September.
The two men had immediately fled the scene of the accident and hastily returned to France to escape Israeli justice.
"They are accountable to the family of this young girl who died under the wheels of a road hog but also to themselves," the French president said.
"Because when you have such a thing on your conscience, and you escape any trial and punishment, you should not be able to sleep peacefully," he added.
"I want justice not just for the family but also for themselves," he said, adding however that France doesn’t extradite its nationals. "There is not exception to this principle," he stressed while the Zeitouni family is calling for the two French suspects to be extradited and stand trial in Israel.
"But if the family of this young girl and the Israeli government file a lawsuit in France, then the suspects will be brought to justice here immediately," he said.
"We must not let this crime go unpunished," the President concluded.
The fiancé and the father of Lee Zeitouni, who stayed in Paris this week, wanted to be able to attend the CRIF dinner in order to present their demand for extradition to politicians but leaders of the Jewish group refused to invite them because "they did not want the evening to turn into a media event around this tragedy."