Police carried out raids across France on Saturday after DNA on a grenade that exploded last month at a kosher grocery store 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, slightly wounding three officers in the eastern city of Strasbourg. Officials said he had been under surveillance since last spring — around the time a French Islamist went on a shooting rampage against a Jewish school and French soldiers — killing seven people.
Eleven other suspects were arrested across the country in the raids on 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 Israeli associations during the raids.
Paris prosecutor Francois 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 French President Francois 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 Mohammed. 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. The country 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 died in a shootout with police in March after the killings in the south of France. That attack terrorized 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-Qaeda. Molins said officials did not believe the men arrested on Saturday had trained abroad, but cautioned that the investigation was ongoing.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of