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French interior minister predicts more arrests amid concern over homegrown anti-Semitic terrorism

Interior Minister Manuel Valls said on Monday there were likely to be further arrests in France of people suspected of plotting terrorist acts targeting the French Jewish community. 

Reuters/Philippe Wojazer
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The warning follows a roundup of suspected islamists at the weekend, including a man whose finger prints were found on a grenade used in the bombing of a Jewish grocery in Sarcelles just outside Paris, on 19 September.

The weekend roundup has caused particular concern, because many of those arrested have no links to France’s former colonies in North Africa. They were born and raised in France, are converts to Islam and are deeply anti Semitic.

"We know that there are dozens, even hundreds of individuals who are capable of organising themselves like the group that has just been dismantled," Valls told French radio station RTL.

Richard Prasquier, the head of the CRIF, the main representative body for French Jews, repeated again on Monday his assertion that Islamic radicalism was akin to Nazism and warned that society had not yet realised "the scale of the evil" it faces.

France’s Jewish community has registered a steady rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents, both before and since Islamist Mohamed Merah's March killing of rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two children and one of their schoolmates in Toulouse in March.

Merah also killed three French paratroopers before dying himself in a police siege.

It has since become clear that he had been on the radar of France's internal security services for years and that the authorities fatally underestimated the extent of his radicalisation following trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan and the threat he posed as a result.

Louis-Sidney is believed to have converted and been radicalised during a prison term for drug dealing.

Valls said indoctrination in prison and the distribution of Islamist propaganda via the Internet and satellite television had all contributed to the threat posed by what he termed "internal terrorism".

The interior minister said that dismantling groups operating in France before they could do any harm was not easy.

"They are very mobile individuals who feel they are under surveillance and who make little use of mobile phones," he said.

Police sources have said that several of the detained suspects were armed at the time of their arrests, including one in the Parisian suburb of Torcy who was picked up on his way back from morning prayers.

French President Francois Hollande has ordered tightened security around synagogues and other possible targets in the wake of the weekend's developments.

 

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