Paris - A mysterious group calling for the withdrawal of
French troops from Afghanistan claimed responsibility on Tuesday for
planting five sticks of dynamite in a large department store in
central Paris, a spokesman for the French Interior Ministry said.
Police were deployed to the Printemps department store on the posh
Boulevard Haussmann after a letter from a group calling itself the
Afghan Revolutionary Front saying that bombs had been planted there
was sent to a French news agency.
The entire department store, which was bustling with Christmas
shoppers, was evacuated and police set up a security cordon on the
avenue.
Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who visited the site, said
the sticks of dynamite were old and had been found by a sniffer dog
in a toilet on the third floor of the store's Men's Department
building.
She also said that the dynamite sticks were not connected and
lacked fuses, and could therefore not have exploded.
In the letter, the Afghan Revolutionary Front demanded that French
President Nicolas Sarkozy 'withdraw his troops from our country
Afghanistan before the end of February 2009 or we will take action
again in your big capitalist stores and this time without alerting
you.'
France currently has about 2,800 soldiers deployed in Afghanistan
to fight the Taliban rebels.
The online edition of the weekly Le Point reported that police
considered the incident a 'serious warning,' and were pursuing
several lines of investigation, including someone acting alone or
individuals from right-wing or left-wing extremist groups.
Terrorism experts noted that the letter did not contain the
religious references usually made by Muslim terrorists in similar
messages.
Alliot-Marie cautioned about taking the text of the letter too
seriously. 'We must be careful about the information in the letter,
which could lead investigators on a false trail,' she said.
In Strasbourg, Sarkozy confirmed to journalists that the
explosives lacked a detonating system and said that police were in
the process of analyzing the bombs and the letter.
'Vigilance in the face of terrorism is the only possible line to
take,' he said.
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