Paris: Among the dead in last week’s Paris attacks were two sisters celebrating a birthday, a promising architect, a talented musician and a woman shot while out doing some late shopping.
What they had in common was that they were Muslims killed in the random slaughter carried out by Daesh.
Most victims of violence by Daesh and other jihadist groups are Muslims, since they fight mostly in majority Muslim countries and often attack less radical Islamic communities such as Shiites and Sufis that they consider to be heretics.
Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack against “Crusader France”, implying all French are Christians. With Islam the second largest faith in Europe, a massacre there is very likely to include some Muslims among the victims.
“Daesh has been killing Muslims by the thousands for years in Africa and the Middle East,” said Yasser Louati, spokesman for the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).
“Now they’re killing Muslims here in France,” he said. “The word ‘Islamic’ in their name is only a pretext for their ideology. Look at the series of attacks they’ve made. There’s no end.” France’s Muslim minority, the European Union’s largest, makes up about eight per cent of the population. Judging from published lists of the 129 dead after Friday’s carnage, about six per cent have been identified by family and friends as Muslims or people with ethnic origins in majority Muslim countries.
Halima and Hodda Saadi were two sisters of Tunisian origin celebrating a friend’s birthday at La Belle Equipe cafe where their brother Khaled worked. Halima, mother of two children, was 37 and Hodda 35.
Seated outside on the terrace, they were among 19 victims who died in the attack there. Khaled said the attackers “arrived in a rush and fired at everybody on the terrace. They killed everybody, including my sisters”, he told iTele television.
Abdallah, another brother, said: “We’re just citizens like everyone else, who love our family and love people ... We’re eight brothers and sisters, and now we’re six.” Another victim at the same cafe was Djamila Houd, 41, a daughter of Algerian immigrants who worked in a fashion shop.
Amine Ibnolmobarak, 29, was an architect who grew up in Morocco and came to France to study. “His parents sent him to Bordeaux to study medicine, but he slipped away to Paris to study architecture and we noticed him right away,” his former professor Marc Armengaud wrote in a tribute to him.
Some websites listing victims include a YouTube video of Kheireddine Sahbi, 29, playing Arab music. For Barthelemy Jobert, president of Paris-Sorbonne university where he was studying, Sahbi was “a virtuoso Algerian violinist ... very active in the university’s traditional music ensemble”.
News about the dead came in various ways. A man in California reported on Facebook that his cousin Mohammad Amine Benmbarek had been killed in one of the attacks and his wife took three bullets and was in critical condition.
Cairo’s consulate in Paris confirmed that Egyptian national Salah Emad Al Gebaly, 28, died in the Bataclan concert hall.
Elif Dogan, adult daughter of a Turkish shop owner in Belgium, stayed behind when the family returned to Turkey and moved to Paris four months ago.
“Terrorism has visited us,” her father Kemal Dogan told Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper. “While we worried something like this could happen in Turkey, we lost our daughter in one of the leading cities of the world.” Lassana Diarra, a French international footballer of Malian origin who was playing at the Stade de France when the attacks started there, announced on his Facebook page that his cousin Asta Diakite was killed in an attack in the city.
He asked his French supporters to “stay united in the face of a horror that knows neither colour nor religion”.
New York says no specific threat despite Daesh video
New York: There is no “specific and credible threat” against New York City, despite a newly released Daesh video suggesting America’s most populous city is a potential target of attacks such as those in Paris, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday.
Police Commissioner William Bratton agreed with the mayor during an evening news conference by both men outside a police precinct in Times Square, adding that there was nothing new about the video, which he called “hastily produced.”
“There is no credible and specific threat against New York City,” de Blasio said, encouraging New Yorkers to “go about their business” as normal, while remaining watchful.
Daesh has claimed credit for last Friday’s attacks in Paris that killed 129 people in shootings and suicide bombings at a concert hall, restaurants and a soccer stadium in Paris.
The assault on the French capital stirred memories in New York of the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane attacks that felled the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers, killing more than 2,600 people.
The Daesh video, which runs for nearly six minutes, includes a scene that appears to show a suicide bomber making preparations and zipping up a jacket, according to a description provided by SITE Intelligence Group, a Bethesda, Maryland, organisation that tracks militant groups.
The clip briefly shows Times Square and Herald Square, two Midtown Manhattan crossroads popular with tourists, and a suicide bomber holding what appears to be a trigger.
‘Daesh preparing for more atrocities across Europe’
Brussels: Daesh has built a “serious capability” to inflict terror and is bent on staging more attacks in Europe, possibly at several places simultaneously, the head of Europol said. After the Paris atrocities, it is reasonable to assume “without any recourse to exaggeration, that further attacks are likely,” Rob Wainwright, director of the European Union’s crime- fighting agency, said yesterday in Brussels. He called Paris the first European instance of shootings and suicide bombings at several venues, similar to the four-day Mumbai rampage of 2008 at sites including a luxury hotel and community centre. French investigators into last Friday’s killings are pursuing “a number of leads” uncovered by Europol, Wainwright said. Speaking to the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, Wainwright called for better intelligence-sharing between crime- and terrorism-fighting agencies, noting links between Daesh and the organised underworld. Disclosing what is “probably secret” at the same hearing, Christian Braun, Luxembourg’s EU ambassador, said heads of national spy agencies have held meetings in Brussels to coordinate anti-terrorism steps. “These contacts exist” but spy chiefs don’t seek the limelight, Braun said.
No fireworks please, says German football chief
Berlin: Germany’s football chief yesterday urged fans to refrain from setting off fireworks at matches after a bomb threat forced the cancellation of a friendly with the Netherlands this week. “Fireworks are essentially banned anyway because they carry major risks,” Reinhard Rauball, interim president of the Germany Football Association, said. “Using them during the sensitive time that we currently find ourselves in would be the height of irresponsibility.” Rauball also said he thought attackers were not targeting football specifically but trying to “get the highest amount of attention possible”.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Prosecutor said he has taken over a criminal investigation into an alleged terror plot that led authorities to cancel the national football team’s game with the Netherlands in Hanover on Tuesday. The probe will examine whether a terrorist organisation planned an attack, a spokesman for the investigator said. The Federal Prosecutor in Karlsruhe is Germany’s top investigator for crimes against the state. The office is also handling a separate probe into the Paris attacks because of the German victims. The game, which Chancellor Angela Merkel and members of her cabinet planned to attend, was intended as a show of solidarity after the carnage in France. It was called off about 90 minutes before kickoff when police received a tip that a bomb attack was planned inside the stadium.
Messaging app rushes to block Daesh sites
Singapore: Mobile messaging service Telegram is racing to shut down broadcast channels used by Daesh to recruit members, but the group is creating new channels apparently just as quickly. Berlin-based Telegram, created two years ago by the founder of Russia’s most popular social network site Vkontakte, has caught on in many corners of the globe as an ultra-secure way to quickly upload and share videos, texts and voice messages. Two months ago, a new public broadcast feature of Telegram became the preferred method for Daesh to broadcast news and share videos of military victories or sermons, according to security researchers. The group used Telegram to claim responsibility for the Paris attacks, which left 129 people dead, and the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt last month, which killed 224.
Shoppers shun major Paris stores after attacks
Paris: The number of shoppers visiting two of Paris’ iconic department stores has dropped by up to half in the wake of last week’s attacks in the capital, management indicated yesterday. Printemps and Galeries Lafayette said the number of people passing through their doors since last Friday’s attacks had dropped by around 30 and 50 per cent respectively. French authorities initially asked people to stay home and not congregate following the attacks which left 129 people dead, but now urge everyone to go about their daily lives as normal. Secretary of state for consumer affairs, Martine Pinville, reinforced that message on visiting both city centre retailers. “We say to all our fellow citizens that they can move about, go to work, they can consume and live normally. That is the message which we which to transmit - that life goes on,” Pinville said. Paris police prefect Michel Cadot, accompanying Pinville, noted security had been reinforced with the deployment of 1,500 troops on the city’s streets. France’s CDF traders’ confederation estimated there had been “an important falloff in sales” since the attacks but was optimistic retailers would bounce back going into the pre-Christmas period.
French parliament votes to extend state of emergency
Paris: The French parliament yesterday voted to extend the current state of emergency for three months, hours after the country’s prime minister warned of the possible chemical weapons threat posed by terrorists.
Speaking ahead of the vote, Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister, voiced his concerns to the National Assembly, urging them to back an extension of emergency powers. “The morbid imagination of those who give orders is without limit,” said Valls.
“Assault rifles, beheadings, human bombs, knives... One should not rule out anything. I am careful in saying this, but we know it and we keep it in mind. There could be the risk of chemical or bacteriological weapons,” he said. Much of the continent remains on high alert following the attacks in France, where the government has already authorised the distribution of a nerve gas antidote to medical centres.
The state of emergency will be in place for three months from November 26.
French prosecutors said one of the terror suspects killed in the seven-hour siege in Saint-Denis on Wednesday was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, thought to have been behind the attacks in Paris that left 129 people dead.
“Abdelhamid Abaaoud has been formally identified, after comparing fingerprints, as having been killed during the [police] raid,” they said in a statement said. “It was the body we had discovered in the building, riddled with bullets.”
The police operation resulted in the deaths of at least two other people - one a female suicide bomber, the other a man believed to have been hit by grenade fragments. Five of the 110 officers involved were injured after meeting stiffer resistance than expected.
Intelligence failure?
Following the confirmation of the presence of Abaaoud on the scene, fresh questions about intelligence leading up to the attacks are likely to be asked. The Belgian national had been presumed to be in Syria, where he had joined Daesh. “If Abaaoud has been able to travel from Syria to France, it means that there are failings in the whole European system,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told French radio.
He called on France’s European Union partners to urgently adopt measures to share airline passenger information. “More than ever, it’s time for Europe to adopt the text... to guarantee the traceability of movements, including within the union. It’s a condition of our collective security,” he said.
Under one of the measures being adopted in France, police officers will be allowed to carry weapons when they are off duty. Officers will be allowed to use their guns in the event of an attack providing they wear a police armband to avoid “any confusion”, according to a directive. Another key Paris attacks suspect, Salah Abdeslam, is thought to be one of the only surviving members of the gang. His suicide-bomber brother Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up in a cafe but did not kill anyone else.
Raids in Italy and Germany
As the Paris probe widened to countries across Europe, Belgian police staged six raids in the Brussels area linked to a suicide bomber who blew himself outside the French stadium, prosecutors said.
Italy was also looking for five suspects after an FBI tip-off about possible militant attacks on landmark sites including St Peter’s cathedral in the Vatican, the foreign minister said.
The minister said possible attacks could be aimed at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or the cathedral or La Scala theatre in Milan.
Police in Sweden meanwhile tried to track down suspected militants and increased security around public buildings yesterday after receiving reports that attacks might be planned on their soil. In Stockholm, police stepped up their presence around the parliament and main railway stations.
Both countries were on a high state of alert to guard against any possible attack.
Swedish security services said they had concrete information about a possible attack on the country. Swedish police meanwhile said they were searching for a suspect identified as Mutar Muthanna Majid and distributed a grainy picture of a smiling, bearded young man dressed in dark clothing. A tabloid said Majid was a member of Daesh.
Police raised their presence at public and strategic locations around the country, including government buildings, foreign embassies and some media outlets. Fewer people than normal were using trains and subways in the capital.
“I don’t recognise my Stockholm,” Camilla Kvartoft, a news anchor at public television station SVT, tweeted. Over the last few years, Sweden has participated in Nato missions in Afghanistan and is training Kurdish forces in Iraq, moves that have changed its traditional image of neutrality.
Rome tourists sites
In Rome, Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said security forces were working to identify five people suspected of planning possible attacks.
The US Embassy in Rome said in a message to its citizens that big tourist sites, churches, synagogues, restaurants, theatres and hotels in Italy’s two main cities might be targets. It urged Americans to be vigilant as militant groups “may possibly utilise similar methods used in the recent Paris attacks”.
There was no suggestion from authorities that the threat encompassed plans for a specific attack.
Like much of Europe, Italy is reluctant to join France and the United States in conducting air strikes over Syria because, without an express request from a government it recognises, it considers the legal justification uncertain.
Meeting on Schengen
Meanwhile European Union interior ministers are to agree today to tighten checks at the external borders of the passport-free Schengen area to boost security after the Paris attacks, a draft document seen by Reuters showed.
Ministers will agree to “implement immediately the necessary systematic and coordinated checks at external borders, including on individuals enjoying the right of free movement”, the draft of their meeting says. The document reflects France’s request to strengthen controls at the external borders of the 26-nation Schengen area, of which most EU countries are members.
