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A man was shot and fatally wounded Saturday in the northeast French city of Strasbourg while being arrested in connection with an anti-terrorist operation, several sources said.
According to initial reports, the man shot at police who returned fire and fatally wounded him, a source close to the inquiry said without giving further details.
According to a judicial source, the operation was part of the investigation into an attack on September 19 on a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles, a Paris suburb, where two people dressed in black and wearing hoods threw an explosive device.
The incident left one person slightly injured but triggered strong reaction in the town’s large Jewish community as it took place just before the Jewish high holidays.
In the Strasbourg operation, three police officers were lightly wounded, protected by their bullet-proof vests and helmets, the judicial source added.
The anti-terror operation which was continuing on Saturday was being conducted in several cities around France.
The French government this week introduced a new anti-terrorism bill designed to facilitate the prosecution of anyone attending terrorist training camps abroad.
The move, inspired by the Toulouse shootings in March, which saw four Jews killed by self-confessed al Qaeda sympathiser outside a Jewish school, would allow the government to pursue suspected terrorist “even if they haven’t committed any crimes on French soil”, explained government spokesman Najad Vallaud-Belkacem.
French-born Mohamed Merah killed a total of seven people, including three Jewish children, in a shooting spree in the Toulouse area earlier this year.
His elder brother Abdelkhader was later examined twice by police on suspicion of having indoctrinated Mohammed, 24, in radical Islam. Abdelkhader, who had previously been investigated by police for his links to extremist group, admitted on questioning to having taken part in Islamist training programmes in Afghanistan and Pakistan in late 2010, as well as spending several months in Egypt to learn Arabic, where his brother joined him “at the end of the Summer of 2010”.
The proposed reforms, which have received the backing of President Francois Hollande, are designed to help combat “the spread of radicalism or jihadism on the Internet and to identify people returning to France after training or participating in terrorist actions”. If adopted the legislation could come into force by the end of the year and would allow authorities to award those convicted with jail sentences of up to 10 years for “association with a terrorist enterprise”.
According to the Service for the Protection of the Jewish Community (SPCJ), there were 310 violent or threatening anti-Semitic acts in the first half of 2012, compared with 226 during the same period of 2011, equating to an increase of more than 37%. Announcing the new bill, Vallaud-Belkacem admitted “the terrorist threat remains at a very high level in France”.
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