Explosives Found at Paris Department Store; With Warning Letter

[tekisui]

Source: International Herald Tribune

PARIS: French police found a package of explosives at the Printemps department store complex in central Paris on Tuesday, a spokeswoman at Paris police headquarters said.

The spokeswoman, Mélanie Leprettre, said a warning about the explosives had been sent Tuesday morning to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, which alerted the police.

A previously unknown group demanding the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan claimed to have planted the explosive devices. Officials said that five sticks of dynamite had been found.

An editor at AFP, André Birukoff, said the news agency had received an earlier warning that an attack on Printemps was imminent. He said that one of AFP's journalists had received an anonymous telephone call on the morning of Dec. 10 warning that there would soon be an explosion at the department store. The caller broke off before identifying himself or giving any other information.

Employees said that the store had been on high alert for several days.

(snip)

In its statement to AFP, a group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front said that it had planted several bombs in the Printemps men's store that would go off if not removed by Wednesday. The statement called for the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan. It added: "Send the message to your president that he needs to withdraw his troops from our country (Afghanistan) before the end of February 2009, or else we will act again in your capitalist department stores, and this time with no warning."

France has about 3,000 troops deployed with the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.

French news reports said that the French intelligence services had no previous knowledge of the group.

Guards at the entrance to Printemps said they had received the order to evacuate the store at 11:20 a.m. and that the evacuation had taken about 15 minutes. They declined to say how many people had been evacuated.

A spokeswoman at Galeries Lafayette, the other large department store complex on Boulevard Haussmann, said that the Paris flagship store was visited by about 200,000 shoppers a day during the Christmas season.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/europe/16paris2.php

[tekisui]

1. Another article:

This one won't copy/paste, but says that the dynamite was planted without being connected, lacking fuses. They could not have gone off. Seems to be more of a warning.


http://www.antara.co.id/en/arc/2008/12/16/mysterious-group-plants-dynamite-in-paris-departement-store/