France deploys 10,000 soldiers after attacks
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FRANCE is deploying 10,000 soldiers on home soil and posting almost 5,000 extra police officers to protect Jewish sites after the killing of 17 people by Islamist militants in Paris last week, officials said yesterday.
Speaking a day after marches that drew nearly 4 million people across the country in honour of the victims, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the country remained at risk of further attacks. Soldiers would guard transport hubs, tourism sites and key buildings and mount general street patrols.
“The threats remain and we have to protect ourselves from them. It is an internal operation that will mobilize almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations,” Le Drian told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
The victims, including journalists and police, died in three days of violence that began last Wednesday with an attack at the political weekly Charlie Hebdo, known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions.
The Charlie Hebdo attackers, two French-born brothers of Algerian origin, singled out the weekly for its publication of cartoons depicting and ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.
Charlie Hebdo’s remaining members are working on an 8-page issue due to come out tomorrow with a one-million copy print run. Its lawyer, Richard Malka, told France Info radio there would be caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.
“We will not give in. The spirit of ‘I am Charlie’ means the right to blaspheme,” he said.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said police officers would be placed at all 717 Jewish schools across the country in addition to some 4,100 gendarmes already deployed.
“Synagogues, Jewish schools, but also mosques will be protected because in the past few days there have been a number of attacks against mosques,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls told BFM TV.
The first two attackers, who had travelled to Yemen in 2011 for training, were killed last Friday after a siege north of the capital. The third was killed at a kosher supermarket where he had taken hostages.
Police said all three were part of the same Paris-based militant Islamist cell.
Valls said police were searching for likely accomplices.
The Turkish government confirmed that the female companion of the supermarket attacker entered Syria on January 8 from Turkey, having arrived in Istanbul several days before the killings.
Valls said the government had begun studying ways to strengthen the fight against “homegrown terrorism.”
He said one proposal being studied was to isolate radical Islamists from other prisoners as cases showed that individuals were susceptible to radicalization in jail.
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