Day of the Jackal plot to kill Macron
Suspect ‘planned to shoot him during Trump visit’
‘Disturbed but determined’
A FAR-RIGHT terror sus- pect has been arrested in Paris over a plot to assassinate French President Emmanuel Macron in front of Donald Trump.
The Day of the Jackal-style plot by the 23-year-old Frenchman was foiled when he tried to get hold of a Kalashnikov assault rifle online.
Prosecuting sources said the unnamed man was from the ‘extreme Right’ and wanted to murder Mr Macron, as well as ‘blacks, Arabs, Jews and homosexuals’. He was charged with terrorism offences last Saturday, with details of the case released yesterday.
The suspect, from Paris, planned to target Mr Macron as he took the salute at the Bastille Day celebrations on July 14.
President Trump will be this year’s guest of honour on France’s national day, which recalls the storming of the Bastille fortress during the French Revolution of 1789.
One of the biggest security operations in the country’s history will unfold on the ChampsÉlysees and the Place de la Concorde for the event, which will involve thousands of French and US troops, who will be commemorating the centenary of America’s entry into the First World War.
It will also fall on the first anniversary of the Nice terror attack in which a jihadi ploughed a truck into a Riviera crowd, killing 86 and injuring 434.
The Champs-Élysees has been the site of two recent attacks. Last month a man drove a car laden with weapons and gas canisters into a police van. In April, a known extremist shot dead a police officer days before the first round of the presidential election.
France remains on a state of emergency following attacks by Islamic State, including the Paris massacres in November 2015 which killed 130.
The would-be Bastille Day attacker mentioned his search for a weapon on a video games forum that was being monitored by intelligence officers.
When police turned up at his flat in the suburb of Argenteuil on Wednesday, he threatened them with a kitchen knife. He was overpowered and placed in custody, while searches of his car found three more knives. Prosecuting sources said the suspect was ‘psychologically disturbed but determined’. He has previously been jailed for three years for ‘condoning terrorism’ and ‘spreading racist hate’, 18 months of which were suspended. Data on his computer revealed he was an apologist for neo-Nazi mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 in a bomb and gun attack in Norway in 2011.
His profile resembles that of Maxime Brunerie, who fired at President Jacques Chirac during the Bastille Day parade in 2002. Brunerie was a neo-Nazi who was sentenced to ten years in prison. The OAS Secret Army Organisation regularly plotted to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle as they campaigned against the loss of the French colony of Algeria in the 1960s. The antics of the far-Right terrorist group, made up mainly of army and police officers, were fictionalised in the critically acclaimed Frederick Forsyth novel, The Day of the Jackal. It was made into a film in 1973 staring Edward Fox as the assassin. Mr Macron, who became president in May aged only 39, has already received several death threats.