October 6, 2012

(JTA) — French police have shot and killed one man in Strasbourg and arrested 10 others in a series of raids on suspects in the recent bombing of a kosher supermarket near Paris.

The dead man, Jeremy Louis Sidney, was shot on Saturday afternoon after firing and lightly wounding one of eight police officers who came to arrest him at his apartment, the daily Le Parisien quoted Patrick Poirret of Strasbourg’s prosecutor’s office as saying.

Poirret said that Sidney, a French national in his thirties who was born in the Caribbean island of Martinique, “appeared to have wanted to become a martyr for Islam, though it is not certain.”

François Molins of the prosecutor’s office of Paris said Sidney had “converted into radical Islam,” adding he belonged to a “network, almost a cell” of “radicalized Muslim delinquents.”

Other raids took place almost simultaneously in several French cities but mainly in the Paris region and the southern city of Cannes, where most suspects resided, the paper reported. Police are still looking for two suspects who are “in the wind,” Molins is also quoted as saying.

In a statement, French President Francois Hollande praised the French police officers for their actions and asked his interior minister, Manuel Valls, “to take all measures necessary” to prevent terrorist attacks. 

A spokesperson for French police told Le Parisien and other media that the raids were part of a police effort to apprehend the perpetrators of a bombing on Sept. 19 in a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris. One person sustained minor injuries in the bombing.

In the raids, the police squads recovered “wills” and “a list of Jewish institutions,”  an unnamed source close to the investigation told Le Parisien. The police hunt uncovered “a small and not very well organized group which, it would seem, was not capable of mounting a major attack,” he is quoted as saying.

Poirret, the Strasbourg prosecutor, told Le Parisien that Sidney had recently shaved his beard and moved to Strasbourg from Cannes.

France’s internal security service, the DCRI, has begun monitoring Sidney earlier this year, according to the report in Le Parisien.

At the Strasbourg apartment, police found a woman wearing a niqab, a six-year-old girl and a baby, Poirret added. The woman was brought in for questioning.

Sidney, he said, had been sentenced to two years in prison in 2008 for trafficking narcotics.

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