French prez candidates at ceremony for slain officer
The two candidates vying to become France’s next president attended a sombre ceremony Tuesday honouring the policeman killed on the Champs Elysees, as they ramp up a campaign marked by security jitters.
Centrist politician Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen stood grim-faced among hundreds of mourners as Xavier Jugele’s gay partner delivered a moving eulogy to the 37-year-old officer slain in the shooting claimed by the Islamic State group on the most famous street in Paris just days before the first round of the election.
“I suffer without hatred,” Etienne Cardiles said at the ceremony led by outgoing President Francois Hollande in the elegant courtyard of the Paris police headquarters. Cardiles was echoing the sentiment of the husband of a victim of the November 2015 jihadist attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall who said to the perpetrators: “You won’t have my hatred.”
Jugele had been among the first responders at the Bataclan massacre that claimed 90 lives, and made a point of attending the Sting concert there a year after the bloodbath. Karim Cheurfi, a 39-year-old Frenchman, shot Jugele and wounded two others in Thursday’s attack before being killed in return fire.
Hollande on Tuesday posthumously made Jugele a knight of the Legion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest honours.
Macron and Le Pen, going head-to-head in the election runoff on May 7, differ starkly on how to protect France, still reeling from a series of jihadist attacks since 2015 that has claimed more than 230 lives. Le Pen has called for France to take back control of its borders from the European Union and deport foreigners on a terror watchlist. AFP