French President Francois Hollande vowed tough anti-terror laws and tighter security as police yesterday staged more raids after a crackdown that saw one man killed and 11 arrested over an attack on a Jewish store.
“The state is totally mobilised to fight all terror threats,” Hollande said after meeting Jewish leaders at the Elysee Palace, vowing that “planned anti-terror laws will be put before Parliament as soon as possible”.
This would help “further strengthen measures to fight this scourge more efficiently,” he said.
Hollande said Saturday’s raids, in which one man was killed and 11 other suspects arrested nationwide, had helped “crush an Islamist cell which we think had struck in the past and which could stage attacks in the coming weeks.”
He gave no details about the cell, but officials evoked the growing threat of homegrown radical Islamists, many of whom were recent converts.
Police shot dead Jeremy-Louis Sidney, a 33-year-old convert to Islam, during a raid over a September 19 attack on a kosher grocery store in the gritty northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles which left one person injured.
Just hours after Sidney’s death, blank shots were fired at a synagogue in the Paris working-class suburb of Argenteuil. Services for the Jewish festival of Sukkot were thereafter cancelled.
Police yesterday raided an apartment in the French Riviera city of Cannes and searched a vehicle following the arrests of two men there who had at one time given refuge to Sidney, a source close to the investigation said. They also seized documents from the flat.
Hollande said France, which has western Europe’s largest Muslim population, should not “stigmatise” its estimated four million adherents.
“The Muslims of France are not all Islamist fanatics,” he said. “They are also victims.”
He said surveillance would be stepped up “at places of worship because secularism, one of France’s fundamental principles, directs the state to protect all religions.”
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins described Sidney as “a delinquent who had converted to radical Islam” and said his fingerprints were found on the remains of an explosive device lobbed at the kosher grocery.
Sidney had been at the home of “one of his two religious wives”, a woman of 22 who has a girl of six and a one-month-old baby, during the early morning shootout in the eastern city of Strasbourg.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls meanwhile warned of a surge in homegrown Islamist radicals.
“There is a terrorist threat in France,” Valls said in a radio interview.
“It does not appear to come from foreigners, it appears to be French converts.”
The 11 arrested suspects were born in the 1980s and 1990s, the Paris prosecutor said, adding that some were “common criminals who set out on a path of radicalisation towards Islamist jihadism”.
Three of the suspects had criminal records for cases involving drug trafficking, theft and violence. Sidney himself had been sentenced to two years in prison in 2008 for drug trafficking.
Jewish groups yesterday complained of increasing hate attacks.
“The facts speak for themselves. Anti-Semitic acts are increasing rapidly,” Alain Jakubowitz, the head of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, told the Journal du Dimanche.