French Still Hunt Kosher Store Bomb Suspects
French authorities have indicted seven suspects in the recent bombing of a kosher store near Paris but have not caught those who hurled the bomb, a Paris prosecutor said.
Francois Molins of the Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Saturday that seven suspects have been indicted for belonging to a terrorist association and that two of them will be tried for complicity in attempted murder.
Molins has said the men belonged to “an extremely dangerous terrorist, Jihadist cell” which perpetrated the Sept. 19 bombing of a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris.
Two men wearing masks hurled a self-made explosive device into the crowded store at noon. One man sustained minor injuries in the explosion. Last week French authorities discovered a cache of weapons and explosives near Paris, which they believe belonged to the terrorist cell.
On Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, French anti-terror police arrested 12 suspects in connection with the attack in a series of raids in several French cities. In one raid, in Strasbourg, police shot and killed Jérémie Louis-Sidney, 33, after he fired on officers at his apartment building.
On Sunday, the weekly Journal du Dimanche quoted Molins as saying: “We have identified the planners of this attack, we know Louis-Sidney handled the explosive device, but we are missing the two people who actually threw it in.”
He is quoted as adding: “According to the testimonies, the videos from the security cameras and other materials from the investigation, the two young men – one black and the other white – who threw in the device are at large.”
There is “a risk,” he said, that not all the culprits “would be identified beyond doubt.”
Such investigations, he added “always present the same problem: You either keep pulling on the thread until you’ve undone the whole yarn ball, or you cut the thread. With a terrorist network, and considering how dangerous this one was, we could not afford to wait.”
Richard Prasquier, the president of CRIF, the umbrella group representing French Jewish communities, has praised French authorities for the “quick action” in pursuing the perpetrators of the attack.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
