|
 French warplanes targeted a command post and a recruitment center
for jihadists in the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in the second
consecutive night of strikes ordered by President Francois Hollande,
a military command spokesman told Reuters.
A French government source said Russia hit targets in the same area,
a day after Hollande appealed to Washington and Moscow to join in a
grand coalition to fight the Islamist group that controls swathes of
Syria and Iraq.
In Brussels, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian invoked the EU's
mutual assistance clause for the first time since the 2009 Lisbon
Treaty introduced the possibility, saying he expected help with
French operations in Syria, Iraq and Africa.
"This is firstly a political act," Le Drian told a news conference
after a meeting of EU defense chiefs.
The 28 EU member states accepted the French request but it was not
immediately clear what assistance would be forthcoming. Britain is
agonizing over whether to join air strikes in Syria, while Germany
is reticent about joining military action outside Europe.
 A manhunt was continuing in France and Belgium on Tuesday for one of
the eight attackers who killed 129 people in shooting and bomb
attacks on restaurants, a music hall and a sports stadium in the
Paris region on Friday.
French police staged 128 raids overnight in the hunt for accomplices
and Islamist militant networks, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve
said. Police found a third Belgian-licensed car believed to have
been used by the attackers and sealed off the area around it in
Paris' 18th district.
Cazeneuve told France Info radio police were making rapid progress
in their investigation into the attacks but declined to give
details.
Investigators searched a house in the suburb of Bobigny that had
been rented by one of the suicide bombers who blew himself up in the
attacks but found no useful evidence, a judicial source said.
The French strike on Raqqa involved 10 fighter jets launched from
the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Defense officials said the
United States had stepped up intelligence sharing, enabling Paris to
identify more specific targets.
A French government source said Russia, which until this week has
mostly been striking Western-backed groups fighting against Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad, had also hit IS targets in Raqqa on
Tuesday.
The action, which was not immediately confirmed by Moscow, came
hours after the Russian Federal Security Service confirmed that a
bomb had exploded a Russian tourist airliner over Egypt's Sinai
peninsula last month and President Vladimir Putin vowed retribution.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Sinai bombing as well
as the Paris attacks.
One top suspect, Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, 26, remains at large
after escaping back to Belgium early on Saturday and eluding a
police dragnet in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, where he
lived with his two brothers.
Hollande has declared a state of emergency allowing administrative
arrests and searches without a warrant following the bloodiest
attacks in French history.
The president met visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on
Tuesday morning to press his call for separate U.S.-led and
Russian-led coalitions in Syria to combine forces and give priority
to fighting Islamic State.
Kerry told reporters afterwards that Islamic State was losing
territory in Syria and Iraq, while the Western-backed coalition was
gaining ground.
"DON'T SCAPEGOAT REFUGEES"
The U.N. refugee agency and Germany's police chief urged European
countries not to demonize or reject refugees because one of Friday's
Paris bombers was believed to have slipped into Europe among
migrants registered in Greece.
"We are deeply disturbed by language that demonizes refugees as a
group," U.N. spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said after government
officials in Poland, Slovakia and the German state of Bavaria cited
the Paris attacks as a reason to refuse refugees.
The head of Germany's Federal Criminal Office said there was no sign
that Islamist militants had entered Germany posing as an asylum
seeker to commit an attack.
On Monday, Hollande told a solemn joint session of parliament at the
Palace of Versailles that France was at war, promising to increase
funds for national security and strengthen anti-terrorism laws in
response to the attacks.
[to top of second column] |
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Hollande would travel to Washington
and Moscow next week to press his case for an alliance in Syria.
At present, Russia is supporting Assad's forces in conjunction with
Iran and Lebanese Hizbollah militia, while the United States and
France are in a coalition with Sunni Arab states opposed to Assad.
Valls said Paris would spare no expense to reinforce and equip its
security forces and law enforcement agencies to fight terrorism,
even though that was bound to involve breaching European budget
deficit limits.
"They will necessarily be exceeded, because the resources we are
giving the security services will not come from other budgets. We
have to face up to this, and Europe ought to understand," he told
France Inter radio.
The European Commission said it would show understanding to France
if additional security spending pushed up its deficit. The EU
executive will reassess the French budget plan once Paris has put
figures on its additional defense and security costs.
"One thing that is clear... is that in this terrible moment, the
protection of citizens, the security of citizens in France and
Europe is the absolute priority," European Economics Commissioner
Pierre Moscovici told a news conference.
STEPPED-UP SECURITY
Britain announced on Tuesday it would nearly double spending on
cyber security to prevent Islamic militants launching online attacks
on the country and increase the number of spies.
Hollande announced on Monday he would create 5,000 jobs in the
security forces, boost prison service staff by 2,500, beef up the
depleted unit of anti-terrorism magistrates and avoid cuts in
defense spending before 2019.
He also said he would ask parliament to extend for three months a
state of emergency he declared on Friday, which gives security
forces sweeping powers to search and detain suspects.
Prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants --
four Frenchmen and a foreigner fingerprinted in Greece among
refugees last month.
In addition to the suspect on the run, police believe at least four
other people helped organize the mayhem.
Investigators believe the attacks may have been ordered by
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national now living in Syria where he
has become an Internet propagandist for Islamic State under the nom
de guerre Abu Omar al-Belgiki -- the Belgian.
Belgian media have reported that Salah Abdeslam spent time in jail
for robbery five years ago alongside Abaaoud.
Police in France named two of the French attackers as Ismael Omar
Mostefai, 29, from Chartres, southwest of Paris, and Samy Amimour,
28, from the Paris suburb of Drancy.
Valls refused to comment on media reports that Amimour managed to
slip back into France unnoticed despite being the object of an
arrest warrant for terrorism-related activity.
France believes Mostefai, a petty criminal who never served time in
jail, visited Syria in 2013-2014. His radicalization underlined the
trouble police face trying to capture an elusive enemy raised in its
own cities.
(Additional reporting by Laurence Frost, Maya Nikolaeva, Julien
Ponthus, Patrick Vignal and David Brunnstrom; Writing by Paul
Taylor; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
