On February 22, in Chênex, in Haute Savoie, Angela Rostas, seven months pregnant, was preparing dinner for her family when she heard two gunshots coming from outside. She goes out to the threshold of her mobile home to identify the origin of the noise.
From the forest, two men shoot a hunting rifle at the forty-year-old mother. Angela Rostas was hit in the abdomen by a large caliber, “the kind used in North America to kill bears” explains a source close to the case. She dies in the ambulance, leaving behind two teenage daughters, Denisa and Rada.
After three months of investigation, the murderers, two hunter friends, aged 26 and 30, were arrested and imprisoned on June 7 to be indicted for “murder and attempted murder committed because of race, ethnicity, nation or religion.
The cold execution of Angela Rostas is no accident. Two days earlier, the two murderers had already led a blind punitive expedition against another encampment, this time Hungarian. A bullet had passed through the trailer and lodged in a high kitchen cupboard, but no one was injured. On the other hand, the terrified families left the scene the next day.
The two friends are hunters and sons of hunters, “hunting enthusiasts” who carry their rifles everywhere, as an acquaintance explains. Above all, they harbor a deep hatred for Travelers whom they accuse of burglaries and thefts, hatred which they share on Facebook groups in particular.
While the press and the government remain silent about the murder, the far right has jumped at the opportunity to pour out its racist hatred and spread its classic anti-immigration discourse, like the Némésis Collective which continues to build a false narrative around the “countless French people killed or attacked by people of immigrant background”.
The shocking execution of Angela Rostas brings to mind the current situation of the fight against racism, all the more relevant in the current reactionary political sequence. Our thoughts are with his family.
