Priest killing leads Sarkozy to call for ‘French Guantanamo’
Calls to set up a ‘‘French Guantanamo’’ have led to a political battle in the aftermath of the murder of a village priest by two Islamist extremists last week.
The killing of Jacques Hamel, which came after 84 people were killed by an extremist at the wheel of a truck in Nice on July 14, has made terrorism the top issue in next year’s presidential election.
It has all but doomed the hopes of President Francois Hollande, who faced sharp criticism last week when a litany of security lapses and bureaucratic bungles that failed to stop the two 19-yearold killers came to light.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative former president who narrowly lost to Hollande in the 2012 election, has issued a call for draconian action to safeguard the public from potential attackers.
Tougher security laws promoted by Sarkozy would introduce preventive detention in ‘‘closed centres’’ for the most dangerous Islamist suspects.
‘‘I know that zero risk doesn’t exist. What I want is zero tolerance,’’ he said.
He added that terrorism suspects, even those not charged, should be placed in provisional detention.
‘‘Our system must protect the potential victims more than those likely to commit future attacks.’’
Hollande and his prime minister, Manuel Valls, have resisted any radical changes to the existing legal and security tools available under France’s state of emergency.
Valls rebuked Sarkozy angrily. ‘‘My government will not be the one that creates a French Guantanamo,’’ he said.
The priest’s murderers were both on France’s 10,000-name watch list of people suspected of radical sympathies.
Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean had pledged allegiance to Islamic State. Kermiche was wearing an electronic tag at the time of the murder.
One maverick Right-wing French politician, Nicolas Dupont Aignan, has called for penal colonies to be rebuilt at Cayenne in French Guiana – the site of the infamous ‘‘Devil’s Island’’, which served as a French penal colony for more than a century until it was closed in 1953.