Man charged with Bastille Day plot to kill Macron
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A MAN has been charged with plotting to assassinate President Emmanuel Macron at France’s Bastille Day military parade which he is set to attend with United States President Donald Trump, a judicial source said yesterday.
The 23-year-old is a suspected far-right extremist who told investigators he wanted to kill Macron at the July 14 national day parade in Paris, the source close to the investigation said. The youngster said he also wanted to attack “Muslims, Jews, blacks, homosexuals.”
Police arrested the man at his home last Wednesday in the northwest Paris suburb of Argenteuil after being alerted by users of an internet chatroom where the suspect allegedly said he wanted to buy a firearm.
Three kitchen knives were found in his vehicle and analysis of his computer found he had conducted Internet searches as part of his plot, the source said.
Macron, France’s youngest president at 39, invited Trump as his guest of honor for the July 14 parade which commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 — the start of the French Revolution and a turning point in world history.
The two men have radically different political views and interests, but Macron appears intent on trying to build a relationship with the US president.
The July 14 assassination plot recalls the plot of “The Day of the Jackal,” a book by spy writer Frederick Forsyth in which a hitman attempts to kill former French president Charles de Gaulle, the target of numerous real-life plots.
On Bastille Day in 2002, president Jacques Chirac was the target of an assassination attempt on Paris’s Champs-Elysees avenue.
Macron has frequently greeted crowds and discussed with protesters, but France remains in a state of emergency after a string of attacks since 2015.
The July 14 parade takes place on the Champs-Elysees, which has been the site of two recent attacks targeting police.
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