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PARIS, April 19: Seven Pakistanis suspected of being Al Qaeda men were rounded up in a series of early-morning raids in Paris by the French anti-terrorist police who have been investigating the activities of the accused shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
The seven men, who the police sources say are aged between 25 and 64, were picked up on Tuesday (April 16) in Paris as well as in two suburbs, the Val d’Oise, and Seine Saint-Denis, best-known as the site of Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport and the Stade de France football stadium.
The men, according to papers provided by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the country’s leading specialist on terrorism and the man who is overseeing several investigations into the activities of Al Qaeda on French soil, are all Pakistani nationals and apparently legal residents of France.
The special police who took part in the raid were composed of two units, one called the anti-terrorist section of the criminal brigade, the other the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the agency that specializes in counter-espionage, and is modelled somewhat on the FBI pattern.
As for Richard Reid, the police sources refused to reveal his specific link with the group of seven Pakistanis being detained at the DST headquarters in the Tour Nelaton located not far from the Eiffel Tower.
They suggest, however, that the group may have provided logistical support to Reid, and could very well have supplied him with the plastic explosive found in his shoe.
In undertaking the raid, which allowed them to round up the seven men, the police were in the process of reconstructing the five days spent in the French capital by Richard Reid between his arrival in Paris (from Brussels) on Dec 17 and his embarkment on Dec 22 on an American Airlines flight to Miami, during which he attempted to set off an explosive contained in the bottom of his shoe.
The police sources say that the information is being gathered as part of a testimony which will be introduced before a court in Boston, Massachusetts, where Reid is being incarcerated and will tried.
Having discovered that during his stay in Paris Reid had placed a call to Peshawar, Pakistan, police decided to trace the call and now say they suspect that during his stay in Paris Reid stayed in quarters belonging to one of the seven arrested Pakistanis.
Reid has said that during his stay in Paris he lived in a hotel located not far away from the Gare du Nord, which has a direct rail link with Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, where he embarked on the flight to Boston on Dec 22.
GUANTANAMO: During a press conference on April 18, a spokesman for the French foreign ministry said that families of at least two of the “French Taliban” being held at Guantanamo Bay, as well as their attorneys, would be meeting a high-level official of the Quaid’Orsay on Friday, April 19.
The families, according to the spokesman, want to be reassured that their sons would not be given the death penalty if tried on American soil. The families are also to receive an account of the two special missions sent to Guantanamo Bay by the Quaid’Orsay, at which time French authorities were able to meet the French nationals suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda.
SONIC BOOM: France has been placed on alert as to the possible hijacking of a commercial airliner flying out of Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, and this 24 hours prior to the crash - apparently accidental - of a small Piper Club into an office tower in downtown Milan, Italy.
Rumours were already circulating about a possible crash by a hijacked aircraft into the Eiffel Tower, and this in the wake of revelations that an Air France aircraft hijacked in Dec 1994 by Algerian extremists was to have crashed into France’s most- visited monument.
French police had become so nervous about what could happen that on Wednesday evening at 6.40pm a French Army Mirage-2000 was sent out to intercept a Spanish airliner that had just taken off from Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport but had appeared to have cut off all radio communications.
The Mirage-2000 took off so fast to intercept the aircraft that it broke the speed of sound (Mach 1) and caused a sonic boom that shook windows (including those of this writer) and many within central Paris and the western suburbs of the city.
