France deploys 10,000 troops
France deploys 10,000 troops
France will deploy 10,000 soldiers on home soil by today and post almost 5,000 extra police officers to protect Jewish sites after the killing of 17 people by Islamist militants in Paris last week, officials said.
Speaking a day after the biggest French public demonstration ever registered, in honour of the victims, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the country remained at risk of further attacks. Soldiers would guard transport hubs, tourism sites and key buildings and mount general street patrols.
"The threats remain and we have to protect ourselves from them. It is an internal operation that will mobilize almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations," Le Drian told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
The victims, including journalists and police, died in three days of violence that began on Wednesday with a shooting attack on the political weekly Charlie Hebdo, known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis yesterday slammed "deviant forms of religion" following deadly attacks by Islamist militants in France and dubbed the "never-ending spread of conflicts" around the world a third world war.
"Losing their freedom, people become enslaved, whether to the latest fads, or to power, money, or even deviant forms of religion," he said, laying the blame on "a culture of rejection" which leads to "the breakdown of society and spawning violence and death."
"We see painful evidence of this in the events reported daily in the news, not least the tragic slayings which took place in Paris a few days ago," he said in his yearly speech to the members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See in Vatican, reports AFP.
Charlie Hebdo's remaining members are working on an eight page issue due to come out on Wednesday with a one-million copy print run. Its lawyer, Richard Malka, told France Info radio there would be caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.
"Synagogues, Jewish schools, but also mosques will be protected because in the past few days there have been a number of attacks against mosques," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told BFM TV.
Valls said police were searching for likely accomplices. The Turkish government confirmed that the female companion of the supermarket attacker had entered Syria on Jan 8 from Turkey, having arrived in Istanbul several days before the killings, reports Reuters.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, who was holding an emergency security meeting of his cabinet yesterday, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi were among 44 foreign leaders marching with French President Francois Hollande on Sunday.
Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu - who on Sunday encouraged French Jews to emigrate to Israel - and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were also present and walked just a few steps from one another. Netanyahu was due to visit the supermarket yesterday.
With growing calls for a comprehensive investigation into whether there had been security failings given that the three gunmen were known to intelligence services, Valls and main opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy agreed on a bi-partisan parliamentary commission into the attacks.
Valls also said the government had begun studying ways to strengthen the fight against "homegrown terrorism". France beefed up anti-terrorism legislation last year to prevent its nationals traveling to Syria and Iraq.
The prime minister said one proposal being studied was to isolate radical Islamists from the rest of the prison population as repeated cases showed individuals were susceptible to radicalization in jail.
"There is a lot of work to be done in the prisons. It's a priority," Valls said.