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Fighting Terror The French Way
A shady terror group is demanding $5 million from the French government - otherwise it will detonate ten bombs hidden around the French railway network.
How does the government plan to combat this new threat? By paying them off, of course. It wasn't always like this.
The group, which calls itself AZF, started sending threatening letters to president Jacques Chirac and interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy in December. Further letters followed in January, and on February 21, cops were given the GPS location of a bomb planted near Limoges in the south-west of the country.
The device, which police described as "surprisingly sophisticated" was detonated by investigators. The Guardian reports that the blast sent a 35kg chunk of railway hurtling 25 metres.
By this stage, the AZF was demanding $5 million in dollars and Euros.
Investigators, who initially tried to cover up the blackmail threats, eventually came clean when a local newspaper published letters it had received. The organisation has also used personal columns in national daily Liberation - the in-house organ of France's far-left - to communicate with the government.
The AZF is a new phenomenon. In 2001, the AZF chemicals plant exploded in the south-western city of Toulouse, killing thirty workers. After an initial flurry of rumours linking the blast to an Islamist terror group, police concluded that no foul play was involved in the explosion.
The French government insists that the AZF is not linked with what it describes as "religious or Chechen" terrorists. Instead, the organisation appears to be either sympathetic to far-left or far-right complaints (often indistinguishable in France). A further alternative might be that its members - or member, police have not ruled out the possibility that the AZF threat is the work of one individual - may be anarchists.
Police are taking the threat "extremely seriously": 10,000 workers have been sent out to walk the French railway system in the search for more bombs.
Despite the fact that a bomb placed on a high-speed French railway line could kill hundreds, the investigation has taken on an element of farce. The terrorists are said to have demanded that cash should be left for them on top of the Montparnasse Tower, Paris' tallest building, where they could collect it via helicopter. After police explained that this was impossible, the terrorists changed their demands, requesting that the money be left on a blue tarpaulin in a field in central France.
Cops were dispatched with the cash, but were unable to find the tarpaulin in the darkness.
French police's willingness to cooperate with the AZF contrasts sharply with the state's previous handling of terror threats. In 1994, the GIA terror group (Groupe Islamique Armee) hijacked an Air France plane in Algiers. The plane and its 170 passengers were flown to the southern French city of Marseilles, where the terrorists threatened to fly on to Paris and crash the jet into the city.
French special forces stormed the jet, killing all the terrorists.
In 1995, following a series of Islamist bomb attacks, including one on the Paris metro which killed ten people, French police hunted suspects with extraordinary efficiency.
One, Khaled Kelkal, whose fingerprints had been found on a bomb destined for a TGV high-speed train, was tracked down to a village near Lyon and shot like a dog in the street.
Kelkal's killing was greeted with despair by the nation's human rights organisations, most of whom have never met a terrorist they didn't understand. EURSOC must have missed the rights groups' protests against Kelkal's cronies bombing of a Jewish school, when dozens of children were lucky to escape death when the device exploded early.
Youths from Lyon's Muslim community reacted with anger, rioting for several days in the housing estates around the city.
The GIA later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Has France gone soft on terror? Certain elements of France's elite have always had an affinity for terror groups, at least those who operate outside the country: Witness the outcry from France's left at the arrest and possible extradition of former Red Brigade terrorist Cesare Battisti.
Yesterday, France's socialist party chairman Francois Hollande made a respectful pilgrimage to see Battisti in his cell.
Having friends in high places paid off for Battisti. A French court ordered his release from prison yesterday, though he still faces extradition to Italy, where he faces life imprisonment for his role in a series of murders in the 1970s.
French authorities up to recently tolerated the presence of far-left terrorists within their borders, provided they 'renounce violence.'
Will AZF's would-be mass-murderers receive the same generous offer, or will they get the Khaled Kelkal treatment?
