Macron says Islamists who hit Russia had tried to attack France

8 months ago 30

President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday (25 March) that the gunmen who killed 137 people in a concert hall outside Moscow were part of an Islamic State branch that was behind foiled attempts to attack France over the past few months.

This explains why the French government on Sunday increased the country’s security alert to its highest level, Macron and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said. More soldiers will be put on standby and ready to patrol sensitive sites, including schools.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday’s Moscow attack.

Russia, which has challenged assertions by the United States that the Islamic State militant group orchestrated the mass shooting in Moscow, continued on Monday to suggest Ukraine was to blame. Macron said this was “cynical and counterproductive”.

“This attack was claimed by Islamic State,” Macron said, “and the information available to us, to our (intelligence) services as well as to our main partners, indicates indeed that it was an entity of the Islamic State which instigated and carried out this attack.

“This specific group … had over the past months carried out several (attack) attempts on our soil,” he added. Attal later said these included a foiled planned attack on the city of Strasbourg, in eastern France.

“The claim of responsibility for the (Moscow) attack by a branch of Islamic State that planned attacks in European countries including France prompted us to increase the Vigipirate (security threat assessmment) to its highest level,” Attal said, speaking from a Paris train station.

“We will deploy exceptional means everywhere on (French) territory,” he said.

Some 3,000 soldiers are currently part of the “Sentinelle” operation that patrols sites such as railway stations, places of worship and schools and theatres. Another 4,000 will be put on standby, Attal said.

France has thwarted two would-be attacks since the start of the year, he said.

France has been hit by a series of Islamist attacks over the past decade, the worst of which, in 2015, targeted the Bataclan concert hall and cafes and bars in Paris – which some Parisians said helped them understand why security would now be beefed up.

“It (the Moscow concert hall attack) brings to mind the Bataclan years, so yes, it’s something that has left a mark in us forever,” said IT worker Raffele Alegretti.

Macron, who was speaking as he arrived for a visit in French Guiana, also said France had offered to increase cooperation with Russian intelligence services over the concert hall attack “so that we continue to fight effectively against these groups which are targeting several countries”.

‘To the benefit of neo-Nazis in Kyiv’

Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged on Monday that last week’s deadly attack was carried out by Islamic militants, but suggested it was also to the benefit of Ukraine and that Kyiv may have played a role.

“We know that the crime was carried out by the hand of radical Islamists with an ideology that the Muslim world has fought for centuries,” Putin said in remarks posted on the Telegram messaging app.

He did not directly mention Islamic State, and repeated his previous assertion that the assailants had been trying to flee to Ukraine, saying there were “many questions” to be examined.

“The question that arises is who benefits from this?” Putin said. “This atrocity may be just a link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 by the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime.”

“We know by whose hand the crime against Russia and its people was committed. But what is of interest to us is who ordered it.”

Putin said the purpose of the attack was to “sow panic”. But as Russian forces were advancing through the Ukraine war theatre, he said, it could also be intended to “show their own population that not all is lost for the Kyiv regime”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy derided Putin’s comments in his nightly video address, saying that for the Kremlin leader “everyone is a terrorist, except himself, though he has been thriving on terror for two decades.”

(Edited by Georgi Gotev)