 |
|
France Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy
|
LILLE,
France, October 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Police
investigating the apparently racist murder of a French Arab teenager
arrested a 45 year-old man near the northern port of Dunkirk Sunday,
October 6.
Around
200 police were mobilized on Friday, October 3, after a man “of
European type aged between 40 and 50” driving a four-wheel drive
vehicle opened fire with a hunting rifle on two cafes frequented by the
North African community, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
A
17-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin, Mohamed Maghara, was killed
and several other people were wounded in the shootings.
The
trail of violence began at 8:30 p.m. (1830 GMT) in Dunkirk’s Petite
Synthe cafe area, frequented by north Africans, when a young man in a
green four-wheel drive vehicle shot at the window of a cafe, said local
sub-prefect Daniel Ferey.
He
then swung round and shot at a group of diners coming out of another
cafe in panic, slightly injuring three people, two of them of north
African origin.
Three
quarters of an hour later, the same attacker drove up to a third cafe in
the immigrant area and opened fire on a dozen youths assembled in front
of the cafe, fatally wounding Maghara who died while being rushed to
hospital.
Police
rushed to the scene to seek the killer.
“It
seems to be someone who was looking to attack north African people
(Maghrebians),” Ferey said, branding it a premeditated act of racism.
The
Maghreb area covers the largely Muslim north African countries of
Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
The
suspect was detained early morning after a neighbor tipped off police.
There
is a Muslim community of around seven million people living in France,
mostly Algerians.
Prime
Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin vehemently condemned the attack, saying it
was motivated by racism and intolerance, news agencies reported.
France
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, while on his first ever visit to the
Grand Mosque in Paris on October 5, pledged to crack down on
racism-mongers, dubbing racism as a “cancer” in the French society.
In
the wake of the attack, some 1,000 people took to the streets of
Grande-Synthe, the Dunkirk suburb where the shooting took place, in
protest.
