The surrender monkies have reinforced the tracks
Posted on 03/03/2004 8:41:17 AM PST by areafiftyone
(Updates throughout with new details)
PARIS, March 3 (Reuters) - A shadowy group is threatening to blow up sections of track in France's SNCF state railway network if it is not paid four million euros ($5 million), officials said on Wednesday.
The group, calling itself AZF after a chemical factory in southwestern France that exploded in 2001, claims to have hidden 10 bombs around the network and has already directed police to a test model to prove its determination, officials said.
The puzzled officials ruled out links between Islamic or Chechen extremists and the hitherto unknown AZF group, which has sent six threatening letters since mid-December to the Interior Ministry and President Jacques Chirac.
"We know nothing about this group but we take these threats seriously," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told journalists.
The group helped police find a timebomb on Feburary 21 that it had buried under tracks near Limoges in southwestern France. Police tested it and found it could destroy a section of track.
SNCF chairman Louis Gallois told journalists that about 10,000 railway workers had begun inspecting all 32,000 km (20,000 miles) of track in France "to check there are no bombs."
Judicial sources said they were puzzled by the group's professional bomb-making techniques, as exhibited by the Limoges bomb, and the uncertainty surrounding its motives.
One source said the wording of the letters hinted the group was a tightly knit brotherhood with extremist thinking but gave no other clue as to its nature.
COMPLEX PLANS EXPOSED
The Interior Ministry had appealed to journalists not to expose the threats, which were known but unreported on by the French media, to let it continue secret contacts with the group.
But radio and television stations ended the self-imposed news blackout on Wednesday morning after the Toulouse daily La Depeche du Midi ran the story in its latest edition.
The threat began with a letter on December 11 from a self-styled "pressure group of terrorist character formed in a secular fraternity," the Paris daily Le Monde said in a detailed report in its edition on Wednesday afternoon.
The group denounced the government, the school system and media which it said were too close to power. It also threatened unspecified attacks, the paper said.
The group's demands became more precise in its third letter on February 13 threatening to bomb the railway if it were not paid the ransom, which media reports said varied from four million euros to four million dollars plus one million euros.
A bomb due to go off on February 18 did not, Le Monde said.
Police then placed a coded classified advertisement in a Paris daily and the group answered the next day with GPS coordinates to find the bomb buried near Limoges.
To pick up its booty, the group first demanded police allow it to land a helicopter on top of the Montparnasse Tower, the tallest office building in Paris, but this was not possible.
On Monday, a police helicopter flew to a location south of Paris after the group asked for the payment to be hidden under a blue tarpaulin lying in a field, but police could not find the site because of the darkness.
Michel Gaudin, director general of the national police, told LCI television that police had not thought it necessary to take any special security measures on trains until now.
Top anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere has been put in charge of an inquiry into the case with another investigating magistrate, he added.
Sarkozy blasted La Depeche du Midi for ignoring the appeal not to report the threats. "This newspaper's behaviour is not responsible," he said. "Let the police do their job."
The September 2001 blast at the AZF factory in Toulouse, which killed 31 people, was apparently an industrial accident and officials said they saw no link between it and the group.
The surrender monkies have reinforced the tracks
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