Three French unions demanding more secure working conditions called for a “total blockage” of the country’s prisons on Monday after three guards were assaulted last week in northern France by an Islamist terrorist inmate, reports FRANCE 24.
“It’s a 'dead prison' operation. Everything will be done at a slowed-down pace. The agents are very determined,’ Jean-François Forget, of the Ufap-Unsa Justice union, told Agence France-Presse.
Thursday’s incident saw the German Islamist convict Christian Ganczarski lightly injure three guards with a pair of scissors and a razor blade at the Vendin-le-Vieil prison, 30 kilometres south of Lille. Ganczarski is serving an 18-year sentence in connection with the attack on a synagogue on the Tunisian resort island of Djerba that killed 21 people in April 2002.
In the wake of the assault, more than a third of French correctional facilities were already subject to work stoppages on Friday.
“As long as we haven’t found a path to agreement with the government, we will not back down,” said Forget, condemning what he called “total impunity” in French prisons. The joint call to action by the Ufap-Unsa Justice, CGT Pénitentiaire and FO Pénitentiaire unions is renewable beyond Monday.
Prison guard sources have told Reuters that Ganczarski was informed just days before assaulting the guards of plans to extradite him to the United States in connection with the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Footage from 2000 aired at Ganczarski’s 2009 trial in France showed him alongside then al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, a 9/11 attack leader who was killed when the airliner he had hijacked crashed in to the World Trade Center.
The three-year-old Vendin-le-Vieil prison will also soon take in Salah Abdeslam, the primary surviving suspect in the November 13th 2015 attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris, during Abdeslam’s upcoming trial in neighbouring Belgium.