PARIS — Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared Saturday thatFrance was at war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages the day before. New details emerged about the bloody final confrontations, and security forces remained on high alert.
“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Mr. Valls said during a speech in Évry, south of Paris.
The authorities started the day hunting for the companion of one of the killers, only to learn later that she appeared to have fled to Turkey and then probably to Syria days before the first assault in Paris on Wednesday. The police had suspected that the woman — Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, the girlfriend of Amedy Coulibaly, believed to be one of the gunmen — might have played a role in one or more of the attacks.
“We are 99 percent sure that she traveled to Syria from Urfa,” said a Turkish intelligence official, referring to a city in southern Turkey. “There is no evidence that suggests she was involved in the terrorist attacks in Francethis week.”
A Tense Paris After Charlie Hebdo Attack
Parisians discussed what the terrorist attack in the heart of the city could mean for France and its large Muslim population.
Video by Quynhanh Do and Stefania Rousselle on January 7, 2015. Photo by Thibault Camus/Associated Press.
France remained on edge a day after security forces killed Mr. Coulibaly, who the police said was responsible for the deaths of four hostages at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris on Friday, and Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers who fatally shot 12 people on Wednesday in and around the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper.
The French government said it would put 500 additional troops on the streets over the weekend amid preparations for a giant unity rally in Paris on Sunday. A number of European officials said they would attend, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, the most prominent Muslim leader scheduled to be there.
Other foreign officials who have said they would be at the rally include Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Paris, Toulouse, Nice and other cities in a show of solidarity, and rallies were held in places as far away as Madagascar, Tel Aviv and Bangui, Central African Republic.
Top ministers in the French government held an emergency session to discuss measures to prevent a repeat of the attacks, which shocked the country and raised questions about why law enforcement agencies had failed to thwart terrorism suspects well known to the police and intelligence services.
Some of the surviving hostages shared chilling accounts of their ordeals at the hands of heavily armed captors, who they said had seemed prepared to die as police forces amassed outside the kosher supermarket and a printing plant northeast of Paris that the Kouachi brothers had seized early Friday.
Mr. Coulibaly, in an interview with a French television outlet not long before he was killed, claimed to be affiliated with the Islamic State, which has its headquarters in northern Syria. Officials identified him as the gunman in the fatal shooting of a female police officer in a Paris suburb on Thursday.
The crisis and its aftermath presented a major challenge to President François Hollande and his government, which are facing deep religious and cultural rifts in a nation with a rapidly growing Muslim population while simultaneously coping with the security threats stemming from Islamic extremists. Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL.
Mr. Hollande, appealing for unity, has warned against seeing Muslims as the enemy, and Mr. Valls called again on Saturday for citizens to join the rally planned for Sunday.
“There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism,” Mr. Valls said in Évry. “Tomorrow, France and the French can be proud. Everyone must come tomorrow.”
But the event was already proving polarizing in some quarters. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, which was not invited, urged her followers to stay away, saying the rally had been “taken over by parties which represent what the French hate: partisan spirit, electioneering and indecent polemic.”
Mr. Valls’s statement that France was at war with jihadists and radicals reflected the depth of the concerns over security in France and across much of Western Europe.
American officials said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. would attend a meeting in Paris on Sunday convened by the French interior minister. Terrorist threats, foreign fighters and violent extremism were expected to be at the top of the agenda.
Simone Rodan Benzaquen, the director of the American Jewish Committee in Paris, said there was deep anxiety among French Jews, who had already been grappling with a spate of anti-Semitism in recent months, prompting some to declare their intention to leave France.
“We wonder whether it is the beginning of a series of further attacks or if it is the end, or a wake-up call that will help the country understand what Islamic radicalism is,” Ms. Rodan Benzaquen said.
The Defense Ministry said it had added 250 soldiers to the 850-person force already deployed in the greater Paris area, and would add 250 more on Sunday. Security forces could be seen outside vulnerable targets in Paris.
GRAPHIC
The Links Among the Paris Terror Suspects and Their Connections to Jihad
Where their lives intersected and what may have influenced them.
Yet a Turkish official said that French authorities were slow to provide information, allowing Ms. Boumeddiene to slip into Syria before she could be questioned about Mr. Coulibaly and the attacks.
Much remained unknown or unclear about the attacks, the suspects and the efforts to hunt them down. After initially suggesting that the Kouachi brothers had another accomplice, the police have said little since an 18-year-old with the name of the person they were seeking turned himself in late Wednesday.
The precise nature of the relationships among the Kouachi brothers, Mr. Coulibaly, the Islamic State and another terrorist group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, remained murky. And with security services still on high alert, there was little public indication of whether the authorities had specific information about possible further attacks or simply remained worried about the potential for other terrorists to take cues from the French gunmen and from the jihadists and militant groups that had quickly applauded them as heroes.
Le Monde, citing counterterrorism officials, said that the links between Mr. Coulibaly and Chérif Kouachi appeared to stretch back to 2010, and that telephone wiretaps showed that they had frequently visited Djamel Beghal, a French-Algerian champion of jihad who had once been imprisoned for planning an attack on the American Embassy in Paris in 2001. The police said Mr. Coulibaly and Mr. Kouachi had been followers of Mr. Beghal.
Mr. Coulibaly was an associate of Chérif, the younger Kouachi brother, a sometime pizza delivery man and fishmonger.
The brothers were being tracked by intelligence officials in the United States, France and Yemen, but large gaps remain in the chronology of their actions and in accounts of their affiliations. A senior United States official said on Saturday that Saïd Kouachi had traveled to Yemen with another person, probably an accomplice, in the summer of 2011.
The authorities are trying to determine whether that person was Chérif, who claimed to have gone to Yemen that year.
The official said that the Kouachi brothers had known Mr. Coulibaly, and possibly Ms. Boumeddiene, also a French citizen, since childhood.
Photographs of Ms. Boumeddiene published on Saturday showed her transition from a bikini-wearing young woman, posing on a beach with Mr. Coulibaly on a vacation, to a Muslim woman covered head to toe with only her eyes showing.
The police said Ms. Boumeddiene had married Mr. Coulibaly in a Muslim ceremony. There were reports that she did not attend her own wedding, where she was represented by her father.
In 2010, Mr. Coulibaly was arrested and detained in connection with an attempt to free Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, who was in prison while facing charges of helping engineer attacks in Paris in 1995 in which eight people were killed. Ms. Boumeddiene was also known to the authorities, raising questions about why she, like the three gunmen, was not more closely tracked.
New details began to emerge Saturday about the standoffs, including the role played by a hostage at the printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goële, northeast of Paris.
Prosecutors said that an employee at the plant had hidden under a sink in the cafeteria on the second floor, undetected and terrified, after the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the building early Friday. The chief executive of the company, Michel Catalano, told Sky News that he had instructed the employee to hide when he saw the gunmen. He said the man, Lilian Lepère, had secretly texted the police during the standoff and negotiations with the brothers that lasted until dusk.
“I could see from a window that there was a man with a rocket launcher and a Kalashnikov,” the broadcaster quoted him as saying. “I could immediately see there was a situation of danger. I told my employee to hide. I knew two of us couldn’t hide.”
Hours after the takeover of the printing plant, Mr. Coulibaly, armed with AK-47s and explosives, took hostages, including women and children, at the kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.
The police said Mr. Coulibaly had killed four people after he forced his way into the supermarket.
RELATED COVERAGE
Stéphane Charbonnier, Known as Charb, Relished Defying Mores
Stéphane Charbonnier, editor of the satirical weekly who was killed in an attack on the newspaper’s offices Wednesday, was instrumental in a series of defiant campaigns.
Survivors Retrace a Scene of Horror at Charlie Hebdo
As witnesses recount the massacre at French satirical newspaper, details emerge of a routine day turned violent — and who the killers targeted.
An Attack Chills Satirists and Prompts Debate
The killings at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo have forced cartoonists to reconsider how far to go when skewering a target.
Aftermath of Paris Terror Attack
At least 12 people were killed in a shooting at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.
As negotiations began, said Mohamed Douhane, a senior police official, the police were aware of Mr. Coulibaly’s identity and his links to the Kouachi brothers. He said the raids at the printing factory and the supermarket had been simultaneous because of concerns that Mr. Coulibaly would kill his hostages if he learned the Kouachi brothers were attacked.
When the police lifted the shutters of the supermarket, Mr. Coulibaly emerged from the back of the store with his weapons, Mr. Douhane said.
A young employee at the supermarket, Lassana Bathily, a Muslim from Mali, helped hide people in a cold storage room in the basement.
One witness, Mickael, who declined to give his last name, told Le Point magazine that he had gone to the market with his 3-year-old son to buy bread and chicken for the Sabbath, and heard a loud blast.
“I thought it was a firecracker,” he said. “But when I turned my head, I saw a black man armed with two Kalashnikovs.” He said he grabbed his son by the collar and they hid in the basement.
“Five minutes later, a grocery employee sent by the attacker came down and told us to come upstairs, or the attacker said there would be a blood bath,” he continued. Upstairs, they found a dead man in a pool of blood and a calm Mr. Coulibaly, who introduced himself as a Muslim from Mali who belonged to the Islamic State.
Mr. Coulibaly ordered the hostages to put their phones down, but Mickael said he had discreetly recovered his and contacted the police. He said Mr. Coulibaly had appeared ready to die, with guns in both hands and a box of bullets nearby.
When the shutters were raised, the hostages realized that a police assault was beginning. “The noise was deafening,” Mickael said. “He was dead. It was over.”
The newspaper Liberation reported that one of the four hostages killed was Yohav Hattab, 21, the son of the chief rabbi of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. Mr. Hattab, 21, was studying marketing in Paris, the paper said. The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions identified the other hostages as Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and François-Michel Saada.
More on nytimes.com
More in Europe
After Terrorist Attacks, Many French Muslims Wonder: What Now?
Jihadists and Supporters Take to Social Media to Praise Attack on Charlie Hebdo
For jihadists from North Africa to Pakistan, the attack in Paris was a justified blow against a country perceived as an enemy of Islam.OPEN SOURCE
Muslim Employee of Kosher Market in Paris Praised for Hiding Customers From Gunman
A Muslim employee, credited with saving the lives of customers at a kosher market in Paris on Friday, was praised online for...
Days of Sirens, Fear and Blood: ‘France Is Turned Upside Down’
Why Reams of Intelligence Did Not Thwart the Paris Attacks
Seizing Assets in Crimea, From Shipyard to Film Studio
Top News
In New Era of Terrorism, Voice From Yemen Echoes
OPEN SOURCE
Muslim Employee of Kosher Market in Paris Praised for Hiding Customers From Gunman
A Muslim employee, credited with saving the lives of customers at a kosher market in Paris on Friday, was praised online for...After Terrorist Attacks, Many French Muslims Wonder: What Now?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered