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Monday, January 12, 2015

France to Deploy Thousands of Forces to Protect Jewish Schools and 'Sensitive ... - New York Times


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PARIS — Seeking to reassure a jittery and unsettled population after last week’s terrorist attacks, the French authorities said on Monday that thousands of police officers and soldiers would be deployed to protect Jewish schools and other “sensitive sites” in one of the country’s biggest peacetime security operations.


The defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said that 10,000 soldiers would be deployed by Tuesday evening, in what he called “the first mobilization on this scale on our territory.”


Mr. Le Drian announced the measures after President François Hollande called an emergency meeting to fashion the government’s response to the attacks. On Sunday, dozens of world leaders joined Mr. Hollande at the front of a march in Paris attended by more than one million people and intended as a gesture of unity and defiance.



The military deployment reflected France’s readiness to commit its armed forces to resist Islamic militants within and beyond its borders. French aircraft have joined the American-led air campaign against militant forces in Iraq, and roughly 3,000 French soldiers are deployed in Africa in efforts to counter extremist groups in countries including Mauritania and Chad.


In addition to the military deployment, the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said on Monday that 4,700 police officers would be posted to guard the country’s 700 Jewish schools after three days of bloodletting last week, when three assailants killed 17 people in attacks on targets including a satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and a kosher supermarket.


Mr. Cazeneuve announced the new protections in an address to parents at a Jewish school south of Paris, according to French radio and news agencies.


All three attackers were killed in raids, but there is an abiding and deep concern here that, as Mr. Le Drian put it, “the threat is still present.”


The prime minister, Manuel Valls, speaking to BFM television, said earlier that one of the attackers, Amedy Coulibaly, “undoubtedly” had one or more accomplices, still at large and posing a continuing threat.


Mr. Coulibaly, who took hostages in a kosher supermarket on Friday, is suspected of having shot a police officer on Thursday. He claimed in a video released on Sunday that he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State militant group. Four Jewish shoppers who were preparing for the sabbath were killed in the supermarket attack.


Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was to visit the supermarket on Monday to pay homage to the victims, who will be buried on Tuesday in Israel, according to the Israeli Embassy in Paris. The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, was to accompany Mr. Netanyahu, who was present at the rally in Paris on Sunday along with leaders including the president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas; Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain; and Chancellor Angel Merkel of Germany.


Turkey’s state news agency on Monday quoted the country’s foreign minister as saying that Hayat Boumeddiene, thought to be Mr. Coulibaly’s companion, had entered Syria from Turkey on Thursday, the day before the kosher supermarket attack.


Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, told the state-run Anadolu Agency on Monday that Ms. Boumeddiene had arrived in Turkey from Madrid on Jan. 2, and had stayed at a hotel in Istanbul.


On Sunday, a video emerged on the Internet showing Mr. Coulibaly describing his role in what he called a coordinated offensive to defend Islam, and urging young French Muslims to take up the fight.


The video surfaced as French media outlets, citing police sources, said that investigators had found a hideaway used by Mr. Coulibaly, 32, in preparation for the attacks, an apartment in the Gentilly suburb of Paris that was stocked with automatic weapons, detonators, cash and flags of the Islamic State.



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