Ilan Cohen was a young Jewish leader who supervised the second synagogue of the Jewish community in Porto. On November 29, 2022, a tire on Cohen's car was carefully punctured so as to be on the verge of bursting while he was having dinner at a kosher restaurant in Oporto.
After dinner, he went home on the highway, where speeds reached about 120km/h, and "miraculously the tire did not burst", Cohen said to PJN at the time. "Taking the VCI (highway), my car had trouble driving, and I was very lucky, I stopped and saw stab wounds in my tires."
Despite then Ilan Cohen filing a police report, he has received no news about the matter to this very day. The authorities have not even notified him to be questioned as the whistleblower. Meanwhile, the damaged tire is on display at the Jewish Museum in Porto, in a room dedicated to modern antisemitism.
The case has since been reported to Mossad. The context in which all occurred cannot be forgotten or ignored when seeking an answer regarding the authorship of the attack.
On November 28th, the day before the facts, Cohen was the first signatory of a petition that 44 French students sent to the Portuguese parliament, which was then presided over by Augusto Santos Silva. The students' petition – which was reported in the international Jewish press on the same day it was sent – asked the State never again to illegally attack a Jewish community, as it had done months before with the one in Porto. In addition, Portuguese State was urged never again to cooperate with nocturnal burglars who broke down the doors of law offices and private homes to steal a server and computers, and with anonymous whistle-blowers who have spent time in psychiatric hospitals and sentenced in the criminal courts, in an attempt to incriminate people.
For these reasons, Ilan Cohen, the petitioner's first signer, said to the Jewish News Syndicate that "The discrimination of the inquisition, was not enough for them to stop there!" and he immediately suspected that the authorship of the attempt against his life came from "a criminal network to silence me through a fatal accident". He had been studying in Porto for five years and it was the first time this happened.
Every day, tourists are horrified by this story when they visit the Jewish Museum in Porto.
PJN will republish this story in January of each year until the perpetrators of the crime are discovered and punished.
