‘Dozen French potential suicide bombers in Iraq’

PARIS: About a dozen French youth are currently in Iraq preparing to become suicide bombers in the country’s insurgency, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday. “At this very moment, we know that there are a dozen French youth who are in Iraq, ready to become suicide bombers,” he told France 3 television. According to French intelligence services, seven French nationals have died in Iraq, in combat or in suicide attacks, and three are prisoners of the US-led multinational coalition forces. “We want to know who goes where, for how long and when he returns,” Sarkozy said in comments justifying a proposed anti-terror law in France that would require air and sea transport companies to provide information about their passengers. “When someone living in a neighborhood suddenly disappears to Afghanistan and returns four months later, it is right to ask him what he did, why he was there and how it happened,” the interior minister said. In a suspected cell in the southern city of Montpellier which police dismantled a few months ago, “there was the wife of a suicide bomber” who died in Iraq, Sarkozy said. His comments came the same day that French police in dawn raids near Paris detained nine men suspected of belonging to an Islamist militant group that authorities said was planning attacks in France. The proposed new anti-terror law, drawn up following the July bombings in London, is to be brought before the cabinet on October 19 before starting its passage though parliament, officials said. Terror suspects detained in France had been eyeing up the Parisian metro network, an airport and the headquarters of the domestic intelligence service as possible targets, sources close to the investigation said Tuesday. The suspicions were based on an intelligence tip-off from Algeria and from telephone surveillance, although there is no hard evidence they had settled on a particular target, they said. afp

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