Urban crime mafias threaten to kill French police

Crime gangs in France say they intend to kill police and the government has withdrawn them from sensitive areas. Arms seizures and rumors of rocket-propelled grenade launchers indicate that the risk is serious.

Residents were brutally awakened at 2 a.m by the sound of automatic arms fire thudding into the walls of their apartment blocks. The bullets came from the occupants of cars down in the street and some of them crashed through apartment windows. The attackers then fled. The same residents had been attacked early the morning before in the same way. During the same 24-hour period, another attack using the same tactics occurred in another part of the city. Again, the assailants fled, although one of them was captured some time later. That area had been attacked ten days before and three people were injured in the shootout. That may look like a report from a war-torn African or Middle-Eastern country, but it isn’t. Most of those incidents happened in the last 48 hours in two different areas of the sprawling Northern Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, according to le Point. [French language] “We’re disrupting their drug dealers, so they think they need to fight it out to control their territory. The shootings show their will to intimidate and impress. That’s one of the possible reasons for what is happening, according to sources within the Departmental Police Prefecture. Seine-Saint-Denis is known to be a national drug-dealing hub. Digital Journal ran a story last week describing the days of rioting which followed the killing of two crime suspects who were trying to escape from police. One of them was a known gang leader in the area of Grenoble he came from. They were killed in different parts of the country. The government responded to the rioting by flooding those areas with riot and even anti-terrorist police who were attacked by Molotov cocktails and small-arms fire. Police stations and businesses were attacked and gun caches were seized. The events in Paris are being regarded by some as the first gambit in what could be a showdown situation between the authorities and mafias in major French cities. News from Grenoble seems to confirm that theory. Authorities are desperately trying to track down those responsible for threatening to kill named members of the police force and anti criminality brigade - the BAC – in Grenoble, scene of some of last week’s rioting. Officials are taking the threats so seriously that they have evacuated certain elements of the police involved in the shooting of the alleged criminal and the rioting, considering that they are running a serious risk of being killed says le Figaro. They have left the region under orders, along with their wives and children. Most of the 45-man BAC unit has been evacuated and has been replaced by elite public order units such as the CRS from other parts of the country. An SMS has spread like wildfire amongst policeman all over the country warning them that intelligence from informers and wiretaps has indicated that a contract had been taken out on the BAC and that revenge for the killing of one of their leaders would be avenged “with a rocket-launcher if necessary.” According to le Point, at least one rocket-launcher is inside the zone controlled by local gangs, and le Figaro reports that a local authority building in Grenoble has been destroyed by fire to avenge the arrest of a bar owner suspected of hiding a stock of handguns and automatic pistols on his premises. “We’re sliding into a mafia system, with areas controlled by thugs who are ready to kill policemen to avenge one of their members” says Patrice Ribeiro of police syndicate Alliance. “We were shot at here by people using live rounds for three consecutive nights. The will to kill is there.”