France prepares for fight
Hollande wants expanded powers for police and to revoke citizenship
PARIS— President François Hollande of France called on Monday to amend the constitution to fight potential terrorists at home and for an aggressive effort to “eradicate” the Islamic State abroad.
His call to arms — “France is at war,” he said at the opening of his remarks to a joint session of the parliament — came as security forces in France and Belgium zeroed in on a suspect they said was the architect of the assault that killed at least 129 people and wounded another 350 Friday night in Paris. The suspect, a 27-year-old Belgian, has fought for the Islamic State in Syria and has been linked to other terrorist attacks.
Hollande spoke after the French police raided homes and other sites across the country in an effort to head off possible further attacks and the authorities in Belgium hunted for a suspected assailant in Friday’s attacks.
Hollande called for quick action by the parliament on new legislation that would give the government more flexibility to conduct police raids without a warrant and place people under house arrest. He said he would seek court advice on broader surveillance powers. And he called for constitutional amendments to enable the state to take exceptional security measures without having to resort to the most drastic options in the constitution.
Hollande also sought to extend the state of emergency for three months and let the government strip the citizenship of French natives who are convicted of terrorism and hold a second passport.
“Our democracy has prevailed over much more formidable opponents than these cowardly assassins,” Hollande said one day after France conducted airstrikes against the Syrian city of Raqqa, the selfproclaimed capital of Islamic State.
It was the country’s most intense military strike yet against the radical group, which had claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris.
The French leader said he would meet soon with U.S. President Barack Obama and President Vladimir Putin of Russia in an effort to settle on a united campaign to wipe out Islamic State.
“Terrorism will not destroy the republic, because it is the republic that will destroy it,” he said.
Hollande said the attacks had been “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”
The French authorities said Monday that they had conducted 168 raids across the country in an effort to root out possible terrorist threats. The raids extended from the Paris region to the major cities of Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse, they said. They also said they had arrested 23 people and detained 104 others under house arrest.
But a Frenchman believed to be involved in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, 26, a brother of Ibrahim Abdeslam, remained at large, eluding a series of raids conducted by the authorities in Molenbeek, the working-class Brussels neighbourhood where the brothers lived.
Salah’s older brother, Mohamed Abdelslam, detained Saturday, was eventually released for lack of proof linking him to the alleged actions of his brothers.
“Me and my family have been affected by what has happened. We learned what happened (in Paris) watching television like many of you and we never thought for a moment that one of my brothers could be linked to this attack. Our thoughts are with the victims,” he told a bank of television cameras lined up in front of the family home.
He said he didn’t see the attack coming and had no idea where to find his brother, Salah, whom he described as “a completely normal boy.”
“He is shattered,” his lawyer, Nathalie Gallant, said after a court hearing held under heavy surveillance, with
“We are using all the possibilities given to us by the state of emergency . . . 24 hours a day.” MANUEL VALLS PRIME MINISTER
soldiers outside, police at the door and a double search for those trying to get into the courtroom.
The lawyer insisted that the family was not fundamentalist. Her client hoped to open a bar. How were his brothers radicalized?
“I would say that is part of the problem: The radicalized, who are often indoctrinated in prison, come from backgrounds that are not at all radical,” said Gallant, who has defended a number of terrorism suspects.
At noon, France observed a moment of silence in honor of the victims. The Métro and cars stopped and crowds gathered at a makeshift memorial at the Place de la République and at the Eiffel Tower. Hollande stood with students at the Sorbonne. Many recited the national an- themafter the moment passed. In other cities — New Delhi, Doha and Dublin — crowds gathered at French embassies to pay their respect.
As France observed its second of three days of national mourning, the authorities in both France and Belgium raced to track down suspects and chase leads.
At one house in the Rhône department in the southeast, around Lyon, the police found a Kalashnikov assault rifle, three automatic pistols, ammunition and bulletproof vests. Officers then obtained a warrant to search the home of the parents of a man who lived in the house, where they found several automatic pistols, ammunition, police armbands, military clothing and a rocket launcher.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve promised to keep up the search.
“We are using all the possibilities given to us by the state of emergency, that is to say administrative raids, 24 hours a day,” Valls said, vowing to keep intense pressure on “radical Islamism, Salafist groups, all those who preach hatred of the republic.”
The authorities confirmed on Monday that one of the attackers had entered Europe through Greece on a Syrian passport last month, posing as a migrant.
The man was identified on his passport — found at the soccer stadium north of Paris where he blew himself up on Friday night — as Ahmad alMohammad, 25, a native of Idlib, Syria. The holder of the passport passed through the Greek island of Leros on Oct. 3 and the Serbian border town of Presovo on Oct. 7, according to Greek and Serbian officials. It remained unclear if the passport was authentic.
All told, at least four French citizens were among the seven attackers. Ibrahim Abdeslam; Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, who met with the suspected planner of the attacks; and two men identified on Monday as Samy Amimour, 28, a Paris native who lived in the suburb of Drancy, and Bilal Hadfi, 20, who lived in Brussels. Amimour was known to the French authorities, having been charged in October 2012 with terrorist conspiracy, according to the authorities. He was placed under judicial supervi- sion but violated the terms of that supervision in the fall of 2013, prompting the authorities to put out an international arrest warrant. The Turkish government confirmed on Monday that Mostefai, 29, had entered Turkey in 2013 but said “there is no record of him leaving the country.”
The United States has provided logistical support for the French airstrikes in Syria, but Obama on Monday again ruled out a ground intervention. “Let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria,” he said at a gathering of leaders of the Group of 20 industrial and emerging-market economies in Antalya, Turkey. “What happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send troops into there? Or Libya, perhaps?”
Elsewhere in Europe, authorities tightened security. Britain on Monday announced that it would pay for an additional 1,900 intelligence officers, and review aviation security, as part of its response to the attacks. With files from Vincent Larouche of La Presse