BAGNEUX, France — She could not stop thinking about Ilan Halimi.
And when Marie-Beatrice thought about the young Jewish man tortured to death by her neighbors during 24 days of squalid captivity in the basement a few floors below her apartment, she could not stop crying.
"I try not to blame myself, but I can't avoid it," said the weary 46-year-old, wrapped in a purple bathrobe after work Friday. "It happened next door, and I can't believe it happened. I would want to tell Ilan that if we'd heard his suffering, we would have reported it. I tell myself that Ilan surely must have thought there was noise, people lived upstairs. And he hoped someone would hear. I imagine him in the boiler room, and I want to ask him to forgive me."
Marie-Beatrice sat alone with her guilt in the aging, 11-story apartment block on Prokofiev Street in this working-class immigrant enclave on the southern edge of Paris. On a table was a summons from the police, who are canvassing neighbors to have them testify about anything they witnessed during Halimi's recent ordeal.
Marie-Beatrice, who asked that her last name not be used out of fear for her safety, said her housing project was relatively calm. But people steer clear of hoodlums and drug dealers who prowl cellars, garages and hallways -- urban no man's lands ruled by fear, silence and machismo.
At the entrance to her building, someone posted an accusatory newspaper headline proclaiming that the neighborhood had refused to see the evil within: "They knew."
Marie-Beatrice's building was a hide-out for a multiethnic gang that called itself the Barbarians. They kidnapped Halimi, a 23-year-old cellphone salesman, authorities say, because he was Jewish and they thought Jews were rich. They subjected his family and a rabbi to hundreds of abusive phone calls and e-mails demanding ransom.
But greed gave way to sadism in the makeshift dungeon guarded by cigarette-smoking youths. Halimi's captors beat, burned, stabbed and poured toxic fluid on him, prosecutors say. One youth snapped at Halimi that he didn't like Jews, and then stubbed out a cigarette on his face.
Halimi died soon after the gang dumped him, bound and naked, beside railroad tracks Feb. 13. No money had changed hands.
