France honors slain policeman

Spain holds 4 over suspected Belgium attacks link

PARIS, April 25, (Agencies): France’s top officials and presidential candidates attended a national ceremony Tuesday to honor the police officer killed by an Islamic extremist on the ChampsElysees.

Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, who are facing off in the May 7 presidential runoff, were present at the ceremony at the Paris police headquarters. Others present were Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

President Francois Hollande paid tribute to 37-year-old Xavier Jugele, who was killed last week when an assailant opened fire with an assault rifle on a police van parked on the most famous avenue in the French capital. Two other officers were wounded.

The attacker was shot and killed by officers. The Islamic State group quickly claimed responsibility for the attack.

Hollande said the French people must “support the police. They deserve our esteem, our solidarity, our admiration.”

In a message to the presidential candidates, Hollande also asked France’s future government to “provide the necessary budget resources to recruit the indispensable people to protect our citizens and give them means to act even more efficiently.”

Hollande recalled that France’s police and military forces are deployed on French territory and abroad to fight terrorism in Iraq, Syria and in Africa’s Sahel region.

This is “a combat that will last, a combat that will be fought until the threat is definitively over. That combat will be long, demanding, difficult but, I am certain, victorious,” he said.

Bomb

Jugele was one of the officers who raced to the Bataclan concert hall the night three armed men with suicide bombs stormed a show and slaughtered 90 people on Nov. 13, 2015.

He returned to the concert venue a year later as a spectator when it reopened with a concert by Sting. Jugele told People magazine at the time how happy he was to be here “to celebrate life. To say no to terrorists.”

Meanwhile, the companion of the French policeman killed by a jihadist in Paris said Tuesday he felt “no hatred”, in a moving eulogy at a remembrance ceremony led by President Francois Hollande.

The Islamic State group claimed the

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Addressing hundreds of mourners at a ceremony at Paris police headquarters, Jugele’s partner Etienne Cardiles spoke of his “extreme pain” at the death of the officer, who had campaigned for gay rights within the police force.

“This pain makes me feel closer to your comrades who suffer in silence like you and me,” he said in a trembling voice, describing Jugele as a cinema and theatre buff who lived “a life of joy and huge smiles”.

Echoing the words of the husband of one of the victims of the November 2015 Paris attacks, Cardiles said the killer would “not have my hatred”.

“I have no hatred, Xavier, because it is not like you and does not fit with what made your heart beat nor what made you a guardian of the peace,” he said.

Spanish police on Tuesday arrested four men with alleged links to suspects held in Belgium over their involvement in the Brussels airport and metro attacks last year, officials said.

The four were among nine men arrested in a vast operation targeting suspected Islamic extremists that was carried out in the northeastern region of Catalonia in conjunction with Belgian police, Catalan police said in a statement.

The men – a Spanish national and eight Moroccans living in Catalonia, all 30 to 40 years old – are believed to belong to a terrorist organisation, the statement added.

“Four of those who were detained have links with people arrested for the attacks carried out at Brussels airport and metro,” a spokesman for Catalonia’s regional police force told AFP.

It is not clear if the four were directly involved in carrying out the Brussels attacks, the spokesman added.

Belgium has been on high alert since March 22 last year when suicide bombers attacked Zaventem airport and the Maalbeek metro station, killing 32 people and leaving more than 320 wounded.

The attacks were led by an Islamic State cell that was also responsible for the carnage in Paris in November 2015.

“The Belgian judge leading the investigation into the Brussels airport attack found ties between the suspected

Left to right: Vice-Chairwoman of the Bank of America (BoA) Anne Finucane, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, First Daughter and Advisor to the US President Ivanka Trump, co-chairwoman of the W20 Stephanie Bschorr, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and co-chairwoman of the W20 Mona Kueppers pose for a family photo during the W20 women’s empowerment summit sponsored by the G20 Group of 20

major economic powers on April 25, in Berlin. (AFP)

authors of the attack and the Moroccans who live in Catalonia,” a spokesman for Spain’s National Court, which handles terrorism investigations, told AFP.

The men arrested in Catalonia “may have participated or cooperated in past actions” and may have travelled to Belgium, Catalonia’s regional interior minister Jordi Jane told radio Rac1.

There were no “clear indications” that the suspects arrested Tuesday intended to carry out an attack in Spain, he added.

Suspects

The authorities said the suspects were also being investigated for drug trafficking, robbery and other crimes.

Most of the nine men arrested Tuesday have criminal records related to petty or organised crime, police said.

Police raided 12 properties in six Catalan cities, including the regional capital Barcelona, as part of the operation which followed an eight-month investigation.

Officers seized three firearms, drugs, cash and electronics during the dawn raids.

At the same time, police in Morocco searched several homes of family members of the suspects arrested in Spain. They were accompanied by Spanish police.

Between 2012 and October 2016, Spain detained 186 people with suspected links to Islamic jihadism, including 63 in Catalonia, according to the interior ministry.

Spain, the world’s third most visited country, increased its terror alert to category four on a five-point scale in 2015 after attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait.

The country has been mentioned on extremist websites as a possible target for historical reasons, since much of its territory was under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492.

But it has been spared major jihadist violence since March 2004, when bombs exploded on commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people in an attack claimed by Qaeda-inspired militants.

Unlike France or Belgium, Spain is less exposed to the risk that radicalised citizens who left to fight abroad will return with plans to commit attacks on home soil.

Only around 160 Spaniards are estimated to have joined the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, according to a study by the Real Instituto Elcano think tank, compared with over a thousand from nearby France since 2012.