PARIS, Dec 17: France’s Defence Minister Herve Morin said on Wednesday that Islamist militants were not the prime suspects in a threat to blow up Parisian department stores.

Morin was speaking one day after a bundle of dynamite with no detonator was recovered safely from the cistern in a toilet in the Printemps store on Paris’ fashionable Boulevard Haussmann.

Police were alerted to the threat by AFP, which had received a letter from a group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front and threatening to carry out attacks unless French troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

But experts immediately cast doubt on the idea that the warning, posted on Monday in Paris, could have come from an Islamic group such as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, which have previously threatened France.

“It’s obvious that the phraseology, the dialectic, is not the dialectic of Islamist terror movements,” Morin said in an interview with RTL radio.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie and a former anti-terror magistrate interviewed by AFP had already warned France to be cautious about assuming an Islamist link to the letter.

“Send the message to your president that he must withdraw his troops from our country before the end of February 2009 or else we will take action in your capitalist department stores and this time without warning,” it said.

Morin confirmed France, a member of the military coalition in Afghanistan, was under threat of attack from international jihadi groups, but said the latest threat did not bear their hallmarks. “The word ‘revolutionary’ in the name of the group, the word ‘capitalist’ to describe the stores, the absence of any reference to Islam or jihad, means that the Islamist trail is not the first trail to follow,” he said.—AFP