Free Republic

Two Muslim Paris police officers have had their weapons taken away from them, with one suspended from duty, after allegations that the pair may have been radicalised. The first officer, a 39-year-old, was ordered to surrender his firearm on Thursday and suspended by the police force as a “precautionary principle”. According to his colleagues, the officer had married a Muslim lawyer in 2011 and began to grow his beard, pray at work and show other signs of religiosity, Le Parisien reports. In 2018, an investigation into the officer was done by the General Inspectorate of the National Police and the...

Parisian police will be given assault rifles and Kalashnikov-resistant shields in a first for the French capital's officers nearly four months after a devastating terror attack killed 130 people, the interior minister said on Monday. The weapons, up until now reserved for elite intervention forces, will allow members of certain police units "to intervene as fast as possible to reinforce the first patrols, notably when we are confronted with mass killings," said the minister Bernard Cazeneuve. "Some of the criminals you are confronted with no longer hesitate to use heavy weapons against you, and you must be equipped with the...

French police take the strain By Patrick Jackson BBC News website The shooting of police with birdshot in the Paris suburb of Grigny on Sunday introduced a new level of violence to the French riots. In the words of local police official Bernard Franio, the Grigny attack was an act of "real, serious violence not like the previous nights". Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who visited the injured men in hospital in nearby Evry on Monday, noted the pellet impacts on one of their helmets. "So they were aiming for the head?" he said. "Then they really are louts." Evry itself...