French PM moots temporary ban on foreign-funded mosques
PARIS: France’s prime minister said Friday he would consider a - model” for relations with Islam after a spate of jihadist attacks.
- ceived security lapses around the attacks, also admitted a “failure” in the fact that one of the jihadists who stormed a church and killed a priest on Tuesday had been released with an electronic tag pending trial.
In an interview with French daily Le Monde, Valls said he was “open to the idea that—for a period yet to be determined— abroad for the construction of
The Socialist prime minister also called for imams to be “trained in France, not elsewhere.”
He said Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, whose portfolio also includes religious affairs, was working on building a “new model” for France’s relations with Islam.
- damentalist branch of Islam espoused by many jihadists—”has no place in France,” Valls said.
France has just over 2,000 - est Muslim populations, which
financed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf or Northern African countries, according to local media reports.
Both Valls and Cazeneuve have faced calls to resign after the second jihadist attack in less over France’s vigilance and preparedness.
The government has faced that both church attackers had been on the radar of intelligence services and had tried to go to Syria.
Sparking particular ire was the revelation that one of the assailants, 19-year-old Adel Kermiche, had been released from prison while awaiting trial on terror charges after his second attempt to travel to Syria.
The electronically tagged Kermiche was allowed out of his home on weekday mornings, enabling him and his accomplice to storm a church in the Normandy town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray and slit the throat of 86-year-old
Kermiche’s accomplice Abdel Malik Petitjean, also 19, had been on the security watchlist since June after trying to reach Syria from Turkey.
‘ You take a knife’
On Friday, the French weekly
L’Express revealed that Kermiche had described the modus operandi of the attack on the encrypted messaging application Telegram.
“You take a knife, you go into a church. Bam!” says a chilling message recorded just a few days before the attack whose authen close to the investigation, according to L’Express.
Other messages speak of the met in prison, his wish to set up a terrorist cell and details of his failed attempts to reach Syria.
Some 200 people were in the Telegram group receiving the messages, L’Express said.
The church attack came as the government was already facing a security failings after the Bastille Day truck massacre in Nice that left 84 people dead two weeks ago.
- mission of a lapse since the two attacks, Valls acknowledged Kermiche’s liberty was a “failure, it has to be recognized,” adding that judges needed to take a “different, case-by-case, approach, given the jihadists’ very advanced concealment methods”.
But he said it was “too easy to hold judges responsible for this act of terrorism.”
On Friday, France will observe a day of fasting and prayer called by the French Catholic Church “for our country and for peace in the world”.