IMMIGRANT HONORED
France on Tuesday granted citizenship to a Mali-born employee of a Paris kosher market who saved lives there during a Jan. 9 attack by an Islamic radical. Lassana Bathily, 24, was in the store’s basement stockroom when Amedy Coulibaly burst in upstairs and killed four people. He turned off the freezer and hid a group of shoppers inside before sneaking out to speak to police and aid their operation to free the 15 hostages and kill the attacker. Bathily has lived in France since 2006. He had filed an application for French citizenship last year.
— Associated Press
The four suspects remained in court late Tuesday awaiting an anti-terror judge’s decision on whether to open preliminary investigations against them.
The possible charges are expected as the French government today unveils new measures aimed at helping head off future attacks. President Francois Hollande said they would include increasing intelligence-gathering on jihadis and other radicals, blocking their activities on the Internet and preventing them from collaborating in prisons or traveling abroad to fight.
France is on high security alert after the country’s worst terrorist attacks in decades. The court case and the arrests came as Prime Minister Manuel Valls urged soul-searching about the country’s deep ethnic divisions and declared that fighting hatred, anti-Semitism and racism was a top priority, especially in France’s impoverished housing projects.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said the four men in court Tuesday were suspected of providing logistical support to Amedy Coulibaly, one of the terrorists killed by police, and requested they be detained on weapons and terrorism charges.
Coulibaly shot a policewoman to death Jan. 9 on the outskirts of Paris and then killed four hostages inside a kosher supermarket before being shot dead by police. It is not clear whether the four suspects, all in their 20s, were involved in plotting the attacks or were even aware of Coulibaly’s plans.
French authorities also arrested five ethnic Chechens on Tuesday in raids in southern France, including one who they said was found with a cache of explosives. French authorities said the men had no established links to terrorism but did have ties to other crimes.
Coulibaly claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group, while the two brothers who massacred 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly on Jan. 7 said they were backed by al-Qaida in Yemen.
In Bulgaria, a court on Tuesday agreed to extradite a Frenchman who knew one of the Kouachi brothers. Fritz-Joly Joachin told the court he was innocent and wanted to return to Paris to clear his name.
Valls said memories have dimmed of the three weeks of riots by disaffected youths in 2005 that shook France.
“And yet, the stigmas remain … a territorial, social and ethnic apartheid that has imposed itself on our country,” he said.
In response to the 2005 riots, the French government, with little success, spent hundreds of millions of euros to improve conditions in its rundown suburbs. Unemployment among young people in the housing projects remains well above the national average and state buildings are often targeted for vandalism and arson.
“The fight against hatred, anti-Semitism in all its forms, racism — these fights are absolutely urgent,” Valls said. Young people who refused to take part in a national minute of silence for the terror attack victims “are symptoms of something that is not going well,” he added.
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