September 13, 2002	Friday	Rajab 5, 1423

PARIS, Sept 12: French police say they are stymied by a recent series of grenade attacks against the residences of some of the country’s principal business leaders, undertaken in the name of a mysterious organization calling itself the “armed branch of the FPLP.”

The organization, whose leadership the French police have been unable to identify, follows up the grenade attack with a letter demanding that the person targeted — most recently the presidents of the French subsidiaries of Rolex and Adidas — hand over to the organization between $500,000 and $700,000 which it characterizes as a “revolutionary Jihad tax.”

The letter — which usually arrives a week or two after the grenade attack — threatens harm to the person targeted and his family if the “tax” is not paid.

It also usually indicates that “we love death in the same way you love life” and is accompanied by the photo of a man dressed in a jellaba and whose face is hidden behind a keffieh, in whose hands is a large open book in which appears a photograph of Osama bin Laden.