by News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
French police officers at
the entrance of a building in Strasbourg, France, Saturday Oct. 6, 2012,
where a suspect was shot dead after firing at police.
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Photo credit: AP  |
France is boosting security at Jewish
religious sites after blank bullets were fired on a synagogue west of
Paris, and amid renewed concerns about anti-Semitism around the country.
French President Francois Hollande met Sunday
with leaders of the country's Jewish community, and pledged to fight
extremism and anti-Semitism "with the greatest firmness."
He said that authorities "in the coming days,
in the coming hours" will increase security at Jewish religious sites so
they won't be subject to the kind of attack that targeted a synagogue
in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil on Saturday night.
A representative of the synagogue says the
building was targeted with about eight blank bullets and services were
cancelled. The representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity
because a police investigation is under way, said no one was hurt in the
incident.
The attack on the synagogue came hours after
police carried out raids across France against suspected Islamist cells.
According to preliminary witness statements, the shots came from a car
which slowed down as it approached the synagogue, before accelerating
and fleeing the scene.
"A person… heard a bang and saw flashes. They
fired blanks; there were no impact signs from the bullets," a witness
told police.
Board of Jewish Communities in Val-d'Oise
Chairman Moshe Cohen-Sabban told Le Parisien: "This was an act that was
more against the Jewish community. This is very worrying."
Meanwhile, the police raids earlier in the day
were based on DNA taken from a grenade that exploded last month at a
kosher grocery store, which led them to a suspected jihadist cell of
young Frenchmen recently converted to Islam.
The man whose DNA was identified, named by
police as Jeremy Sydney, was killed by police after he opened fire on
them, wounding three officers in the eastern city of Strasbourg.
Officials said he had been under surveillance since last spring — around
the time a French Islamic terrorist went on a shooting rampage against a
Jewish school and French soldiers, killing seven people.
The police unit was fired on after entering a
fourth-floor apartment at about 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) in the Esplanade
district of Strasbourg and an officer was wounded by shots that hit his
bulletproof vest and helmet.
"During an anti-terrorist police operation in
Strasbourg ... gunfire was exchanged between police and the suspect. The
latter was killed," Strasbourg prosecutor Patrick Poirret said in a
statement.
"The group was met with a .357 Magnum
[revolver]," said Norbert Georgel, secretary for the region's police
union, who said the wounded officer's life was not in danger.
Neighbors told Reuters that a couple had lived
in the apartment with their two children for the past four to six
months. The man was bearded and the woman wore the Muslim full-face
veil, they said.
Reuters could not immediately confirm whether that man was the suspect shot by police.
The French Interior Ministry declined comment.
Eleven other suspects were arrested across the
country Saturday, according to the Sipa news agency. One man was
carrying a loaded gun, and police found weapons, cash and a list of
Paris-area Jewish and Israeli associations during the raids.
Paris prosecutor François Molins said all the
arrested suspects were French and recent converts to Islam. They were
all born in the 1980s or early 1990s. Four of the men involved in the
raid had written wills.
"You can imagine what their other plans could
have been," counterterrorism official Eric Voulleminot said at a news
conference with Molins.
The prosecutor described 33-year-old Sydney,
sentenced in 2008 to two years in prison for drug trafficking, as a
"delinquent who converted to radical Islam." He said others in the cell
indicated they wanted to return to "the land of jihad."
A statement from President François Hollande
praised the police for the raids and said the state would continue to
"protect the French against all terrorist threats."
Last month's firebombing of the grocery, in a
Jewish neighborhood in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, happened on Sept.
19, the same day a French satirical paper published crude caricatures of
the Prophet Muhammad. Anti-Western protests were also growing at the
time against an anti-Islam film. One person was slightly injured, but
the attack with a Yugoslav grenade came after a summer of what residents
described as growing anti-Semitic threats.
"What happened in Sarcelles was just a start,
or was just a test," Sammy Ghozlan, head of a French group that tracks
anti-Semitism in the country, said. "Islamism is a force of influence
and Islamists are going to seek out the weakest people to teach them to
kill."
France, which has the largest Muslim
population in Europe, is trying to contain the spread of a radical Islam
hostile to Western influences. France has made similar anti-terrorism
arrests before, only to release the suspects several days later without
charges.
The prosecutor was careful not to draw direct
links between Saturday's arrests and Mohamed Merah, a young Frenchman of
Algerian descent who was killed in a shootout with police in March
after his terrorist attacks on the French Jewish community, which has
since ramped up security in many parts of the country.
Merah had studied at an Islamist paramilitary camp in
Pakistan and claimed ties to al-Qaida. Molins said officials did not
believe the men arrested Saturday had trained abroad, but cautioned that
the investigation was ongoing.
News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=6005
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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