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Updated 9.45pm
FRENCH AUTHORITIES DETAINED 12 people overnight in the suburbs of Paris in connection with last week’s Islamist attacks that killed 17 people.
The nine men and three women were to be questioned about “possible logistic support” they may have given to the gunmen, in particular weapons and vehicles, according to a judicial source.
The raids came as US Secretary of State John Kerry joined French President Francois Hollande in France to show his country’s support in this difficult time.
In an unusual move, Hollande trotted down the steps of the Elysee Palace to greet Kerry, who hugged the French president in front of a phalanx of photographers.
“I know you know that we share the pain and the horror of everything that you went through,” said Kerry.
Our hearts are with you.
Hollande said the French people “were victim of an exceptional terrorist attack,” likening last week’s events to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“We must therefore together find the necessary response. And that is the (reason) for (our) meeting today beyond friendship,” said Hollande.
The United States faced criticism for not sending a top-level representative to last Sunday’s march in Paris in the wake of the attacks, which drew 1.5 million people onto the streets of the French capital and dozens of world leaders.
The White House was forced to admit it erred in sending only its ambassador when most countries were represented at head of state or ministerial level.
Arrests
Raids took place in Montrouge just outside Paris, where gunman Amedy Coulibaly killed a policewoman last week, Grigny where he grew up, Fleury-Merogis south of the French capital and Epinay-sur-Seine north of the city.
According to a police source, investigators have followed several people over the past few days that had been pinpointed thanks to probes on people in the alleged entourage of the Kouachi brothers, who waged the Charlie Hebdo attack, and Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman and four Jews in a supermarket.
Among other things, they are looking for the car of Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s wanted partner who is now believed to be in Syria.
First published 8.15am
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Hopefully France’s justice system is not like our own, or else these people will be back on the streets in time for evening prayers to their spaghetti monster.
No worry they will just come up with a new one, they always do because
French legislators react to each terrorist wave with the enactment of new laws.
Four major counter-terror laws are the ones of 1986 (Law no. 86-1020 of 9 September), of 1996 (Law no. 96-647 of 22 July), of 2001 (Law no. 2001-1062 of 15 November), and of 2006 (Law no. 2006-64 of 23 January).
‘Spaghetti monster…’ The mono-atheists are slowly building an irony-clad narrative.
I’m actually agnostic. Atheism is just as illogical as theism.
I presume you feel the same about people who don’t believe in unicorns?
Im both Atheist and agnostic to both god and David Ikes theory of reptiles. The laws of physics show no intervening beings and the laws of probability states less complex things such as a universe are more likely to exist than more complex things such as universe creators. I cant prove that god or fish eating flying aliens dont exist but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Do people who don’t believe in unicorns drone on about a superquinn sausage creature that lives in a field?
Mono-atheists all cling to the same superfluous outline brought down from the coffee house on Samsung tablets.
No wonder the JOurnal and other media did not show the Charlie Hedbo front page as this headline from elsewhere warns.
‘My husband is being lashed to death… they are killing him more every week’: Agony of wife of Saudi Arabian blogger who is being flogged 50 times every Friday for ‘insulting Islam’
The journal did. Have a look. It’s still there.
These people are going to feel pretty stupid when Elvis comes back to Earth and has a tussle with Thor in an MMA fixture in Croke Park.
Anyone hear from Frank??
That will be subject to license!
Elvis doesn’t need the approval of your puny human laws, he is the law
Frank’s getting probed by the lizard people and having his implanted chip updated! Normal numerology nonsense will continue shortly.
do you not know what day it is today.. 16/01/2015 16-1 = 15 there is a 15 in 2015 coincidence or what.
Frank and glen are having a Friday conspiracy movie night. Horgay is running the projector.
September 2012, Barack Obama at the United Nations “The future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
Showing the true colours pf the man who watched football instead of marching with the other major leaders . I wonder what our Islamofascist apparatchiks will have to comment about this signal to the various groups that he is so fond of?
Nonsens, for example the Obama administration markedly stepped up the use of drones. Since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the CIA has launched 330 strikes on Pakistan , his predecessor, President George Bush, conducted 51 strikes in four years. And in Yemen, Obama opened a new front in the secret drone war.
Across Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Obama administration has launched more than 390 drone strikes in t five years , eight times as many as were launched in the entire Bush presidency. These strikes have killed more than 2,400 people, at least 273 of them reportedly civilians.
Under Obama’s presidency dronestrikes killed six times as many people as were under Bush.
It is to be hoped that France will start to recover in the way that Norway recovered and was able to regain its balance and stability after its terrorist atrocity.
The Paris attacks were atrocities, anyone complicit needs to be made accountable, but France needs to move on and avoid making hate figures of Muslims, with French Muslims accepting, as the vast majority do, that they live in a civic and secular republic.
Polarisation of opinion and division between Muslims and nonMuslims will only serve the terrorist agenda.
How do you say CIA in French?
There is a saying that goes by–”He who burnt himself with hot soup blows also in the cold milk too .” Guess where it applies?
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