One killed in French anti-extremist operation

PARIS: A man was shot and fatally wounded yesterday in the eastern French city of Strasbourg while being arrested by police in a nationwide anti-terrorist operation, judicial and police sources said.
About 10 others were arrested as part of the operation directed at a suspected Salafist network. The anti-terror sweep was continuing on Saturday in several cities around France.
According to initial reports, when police entered the suspect’s home in Strasbourg he shot at them. They returned fire and fatally wounded him, a source close to the inquiry said, without giving further details.
Another man arrested in the Paris suburbs was said to be armed and “dangerous.”
Police swooped simultaneously in several cities, among them Cannes in the southeast, where a man was detained without offering resistance.
The police operation was part of the investigation into an incident on September 19 when “a minimally powerful explosive” was hurled into a kosher grocery store in Sarcelles, in the Paris suburbs, a judicial source said.
That incident left one person slightly injured but triggered strong reaction in the town’s large Jewish community.
The inquiry into the incident has been handed over from local investigators to the specialist anti-terrorist authorities.
A source close to the inquiry, asked about the readiness of extremists to carry out other attacks against places frequented by the Jewish community, called for caution.
But he said that the suspects had “a list of objectives” and the inquiry had to determine whether plans were well advanced or had simply been discussed among the suspects.
In the Strasbourg operation, three police officers were lightly wounded, protected by their bullet-proof vests and helmets, the judicial source added. The dead man’s woman companion was arrested.
A police source said the suspects targeted in the operation could belong to a Salafist extremist network.
Investigators have declined to link the Sarcelles attack to the recent anti-Islam film.
Moshe Cohen-Sabban said after the incident that there were no “special” religious tensions in the working-class area with a population of about 60,000 and large numbers of Muslims and Jews, many of the latter immigrants from North Africa in the 1960s and their descendants.
But the council representing Jewish institutions in France (CRIF) said it feared that the incident in Sarcelles was related to the violence surrounding the anti-Islam film and Israel’s ambassador to France, Yossi Gal, condemned it as an “anti-Semitic attack.”
It came during a busy period in the Jewish calendar, between the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement Yom Kippur.