The Islamists were planning this attack in France a couple of months ago.
France Says Extremists Are Enlisting Its Citizens
Police Assert Some Trained in Mideast Could Attack Paris
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; A15
PARIS -- French police investigating plans by a group of Islamic extremists to attack targets in Paris discovered last month that the group was recruiting French citizens to train in the Middle East and return home to carry out terrorist attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said.
One French official said the extremists were using a virtual "underground railroad" through Syria to spirit European and Middle Eastern citizens into and out of Iraq. A senior French law enforcement official, who declined to be quoted by name because he was speaking about classified information, said French citizens had undergone terrorist training at camps in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
"There's always been an enormous jihad zone to train people to fight in their country of origin," the official said. "We saw it Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now we're seeing it in Iraq." washingtonpost.com
Algerian group calls France 'enemy number one'
expatica.com
PARIS, Sept 27 (AFP) - An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.
"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.
"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying.
France was mentioned 15 times in the text, and the Algerian government was also targeted, the officials said.
Nine people detained in a series of raids west of Paris Monday are suspected members of the GSPC, officials have said. They were being questioned for a second day Tuesday at the headquarters of the DST domestic intelligence agency.
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."
The GSPC was created from a split in the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the main force in Algeria's long insurgency which was also responsible for a series of bombings in France in 1995. |
