A French man, who served five years in a French prison for the 2011 hit-and-run death of an Israeli woman in Tel Aviv, was killed on Thursday in an apparent assassination near Paris, French and Israeli media reported.
On Thursday morning, two men on a motorized scooter wearing helmets shot 51-year-old Eric Robic, who himself was on a scooter, in Hauts-de-Seine, a Parisian suburb, French newspaper Le Parisien reported.
Robic had confessed to being behind the wheel when he struck 25-year-old Pilates instructor Lee Zeitouni on the morning of September 16, 2011, as she was crossing a Tel Aviv street to get to work. Robic and Claude Khayat, the passenger in the vehicle, fled to France soon after the hit-and-run.
Pressure had mounted on France to return the men to Israel to face trial, but France does not extradite its citizens outside the European Union.
Then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy vowed the family would get justice if a trial took place in France but stood firm against extradition, sparking a diplomatic spat with Jerusalem.
Robic was sentenced to five years in prison. Khayat was found guilty of not providing aid to a person in distress and sentenced to 15 months in jail.
“I feel a certain relief, a circle that cried out for justice has been closed,” the Ynet news outlet quoted Lee’s father, Itzik Zeitouni, as saying after hearing the news.
“Roy, my daughter’s partner, was the first to inform me that Eric Robic was murdered. This makes us happy; as far as I’m concerned, he is my daughter’s despicable murderer who fled the scene and the sentence he received in France was laughable,” Zeitouni said.”I feel like justice was served today.”
Zeitouni said that Robic had tried to offer the family money to drop a lawsuit in Israel, but they had refused.
“I did not agree to sell my daughter for money. I hope that the day of the other person in the car will also come,” he said.
French police did not immediately identify any suspects or motive in the killing, but Robic has a long criminal record in France in addition to his involvement in Zeitouni’s death.
In 2018, Robic was detained on suspicion of corruption after the director and supervisor employed by the Fresnes jail, in the suburbs of Paris, were suspected of having received bribes from inmates in exchange for preferential treatment.
In 2025, he was sentenced in France to 18 months in prison and two years of probation for an international luxury car fraud scheme worth €1 million, with proceeds laundered in Israel, Poland, and China, Ynet reported.
An investigative file also named him in a sting operation involving 1.6 billion euros in income tax collected on carbon dioxide quotas that never reached the French treasury. Interpol estimated the scheme caused an additional 5–10 billion euros in damage to the European Union. Robic was not prosecuted in that case.
Source:
www.timesofisrael.com
