Orly airport, where about 3,000 people were evacuated Saturday morning after a man who attacked a military security patrol was shot dead, began returning to normal sevice late in the day; the father and brother of the assailant, 39-year-old Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a French national with a string of convictions for violent crime and who the French authorities report became close to radical Islamist movements in prison, were taken into custody for questioning.
Orly airport was locked down Saturday morning when a 39-year-old man monitored by French anti-terrorsim services was shot dead after disarming a woman soldier on a security patrol in the 'South' terminal with two colleagues.
A programme aimed at de-radicalising Islamist extremists in France, launched by President François Hollande after the country was hit by a series of terrorist attacks, has been an 'amateurish' flop driven by a government that 'panicked', a cross-party parliamentary commission of enquiry has reported.
Three men, aged between 18 and 30, were arrested in dawn raids on Tuesday in the Paris region, Marseille and Clermont-Ferrand, in what press reports said was an urgent operation that was part of an investigtion opened in January.
Following the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, probation officers in the prison system have been instructed to inform the authorities about the “radicalisation” of prisoners. When one officer criticised the new system in a newspaper interview, claiming that being forced to work as “intelligence agents” undermined the trust between probation workers officers and prisoners, her job was threatened. Probation officers also fear that they will get the blame for not flagging a problem if former prisoners go on to commit terrorist acts. Maxime Grimbert reports.
Lawyers of victims of the November 13th 2015 terrorist attacks in the French capital, which left 130 people dead and hundreds more wounded, say their clients should receive additional compensation for the “very considerable distress” they suffered and victims’ families be compensated for the hardship endured while waiting for news of their loved ones.
The ceremony, at the Invalides military complex in Paris, was attended by hundreds of relatives of the victims of a series of terrorist attacks in France since January 2015, and also by President François Hollande and political leaders.
