French police on Saturday night arrested an Algerian immigrant for the attack on a synagogue in the southern French town of La Grande Motte.
The 33-year-old Algerian man is suspected to have set fire to several entry doors to the synagogue and nearby vehicles. The Rabbi and the congregation were inside the place of worship at the time of the attack.
A police officer was injured from the blast caused by an exploding vehicle.
The attacker, caught on surveillance tape, was wearing full Palestinian terrorist fan regalia while carrying out the attack. “French news group BFMTV claims the suspect is 33 years old and originally from Algeria,” UK’s Sky News TV reported. “Prosecutors said a male suspect who was spotted in surveillance videos fleeing the site was carrying a Palestinian flag and a weapon.”
The French authorities “are treating the attack as an attempted assassination linked to a terrorist group,” the broadcaster added.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported Sunday:
French police have arrested a suspect in the attack on a synagogue in southern France. Gérald Darmanin, the country’s interior minister, said on X late Saturday, August 24, that the ‘perpetrator of the criminal fires at the synagogue’ had been detained.According to BFM TV, the suspect was arrested in Nîmes and was shot at by police officers before being taken into emergency care. His life is not thought to be in danger.Earlier in the day, French authorities opened a terrorism investigation after an arson attack on a synagogue in a southern French town injured a police officer and security forces searched for a suspect.Two cars parked at the Beth Yaacov synagogue complex in the seaside resort town of La Grande Motte near Montpellier were set ablaze just after 8 am on Saturday, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
Firefighters discovered additional fires at two entrances to the synagogue. A police officer who walked up to the site was injured after a propane gas tank in one of the vehicles detonated, the statement said. Five people, including the rabbi, who were present in the synagogue complex at the time of the attack were unharmed, it added.
The arrest comes amid Saturday’s deadly stabbing in the German city of Solingen. The Islamic State took responsibility for the terrorist attack, declaring that German passersby were murdered by a 26-year-old Syrian man ‘to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.’
“[T]he so-called Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack,” France-based Euronews TV reported Sunday. “In a statement published on its Amaq news site earlier on Saturday, the group said the attack had been carried out ‘to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.’
These terror attacks in Europe coincide with largely Muslim demonstrations across the West calling for “globalizing the Intifada,” a reference to large-scale terrorist attacks on Jews and Israelis in late 1990s and in early 2000s.
Amid uncontrolled mass-migration from Muslim and Arab countries, attacks on French Jews nearly quadrupled last year, figures show. “Citing figures from the French interior ministry and a French-Jewish security watchdog, the Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) said there were 1,676 anti-Semitic acts last year compared to 436 the year prior, ” the France24 TV reported in January.
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