France began beefing up security across the country on Tuesday after an unknown group placed dynamite in a Paris department store and threatened more attacks if French troops were not pulled out of Afghanistan.
Police located and made safe the five sticks of dynamite placed in a washroom in the giant Printemps store on Boulevard Haussmann, one of Europe’s busiest shopping streets.
The boulevard was cordoned off for several hours while hordes of Christmas shoppers and tourists were evacuated.
PHOTO: AFP
A group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front sent a letter to Agence France-Presse (AFP) warning of “several bombs” in the upscale store and demanding that France withdraw its 2,600 troops by the end of February.
French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said police reinforcements would be deployed in Paris and major French cities following the discovery of the dynamite.
“I have decided to reinforce security arrangements in Paris and major provincial cities,” she told the French Senate, announcing a meeting of police, intelligence and transport chiefs yesterday in Paris.
“It is our role to be constantly vigilant, whatever the circumstances,” she said later.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, meanwhile, told journalists there was a “strong terrorist threat to France.”
Executives from Printemps Haussmann, which has 2,000 employees and gets about 100,000 customers a day, were due to take part in the midday meeting in Paris along with other store heads.
The dynamite was not attached to a detonator and posed little danger, the minister said.
The letter, which AFP passed on to police, linked the warning to the French deployment in Afghanistan, where NATO and US forces are battling Taliban insurgents alongside government forces.
“Send the message to your president that he must withdraw his troops from our country before the end of February 2009 or else we will take action in your capitalist department stores and this time, without warning,” it said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Strasbourg to address the European Parliament, called for vigilance and firmness in the battle against terrorism.
“Vigilance against terrorism is the only possible policy; vigilance because unfortunately anything can happen, and firmness because you cannot compromise with terrorism,” he told reporters.
The postmark on the threatening letter showed it was sent on Monday in northeastern Paris and arrived at AFP before 9am on Tuesday.
A French former anti-terrorist judge, who viewed the text, told AFP that the language was not of the kind normally used by Islamist militants, in particular because there were no religious references of any sort.
The judge spoke on condition of anonymity.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS