Jewish targets guarded

Press, 11 August 1982, Page 6

Jewish targets guarded

NZPA-Reuter Paris : Synagogues and other potential Jewish targets were under guard today as police tried to track the men who carried out France's worst anti-Semitic massacre since the World War Two. •

Six people were killed and 22 injured in a grenade and gun attack yesterday on a Jewish restaurant in the Marais district in central Paris, a predominantly Jewish area.

Two young men walked into Jo Goldenberg’s, the city’s best-known Jewish restaurant, at lunchtime and asked for a table.

While they ‘waited, one tossed a hand-grenade. As. it exploded, the ■ two calmly opened fire for three minutes with machine pistols, killing and wounding staff and customers, said police. Backing out into the street, they y walked. slowly behind their moving getaway car,, taking deliberate aim at people sheltering in shop doorways and behind parked cars, before jumping in and speeding away.

‘ An evening newspaper said that it had received a taped message saying ' a " group

called Action Directe (Direct Action) had claimed responsibility for the incident, but then said a later, call denied participation by the group.

The police described the gunmen and the man driving the car as dark-haired and of Mediterranean appearance, aged about 30. They believe the Action Directe group has Middle Eastern connections. An official of B’nai B’rith, a leading Jewish group, said in New York that Action Directe was an extreme Leftist organisation with apparent links to terrorism in West Germany, Italy and the Middle East. It had up to 100 members, all French, he said.

As the police hunt spread, French politicians expressed shock and horror at the latest act of political violence in the capital.

The French Prime Minister (Mr Pierre Mauroy), who visited the bloodstained and shattered restaurant, said that criminal elements were to blame and added: "We do not accept the. shedding of mnocept blood.'” ■ ■ ' /’ ■President Francois Mitterrand attended a synagogue in

the immediate area for religious rites for the dead and wounded. The French Interior Minister (Mr Gaston Defferre) sent a message to Jewish organisations saying the attack was intolerable.

The Israeli Embassy issued a statement condemning the attack, saying it had been encouraged by antiSemitic attitudes. The head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Paris, Ibrahim Souss, issued a statement deploring the loss of innocent lives.

A PLO ' spokesman \in Beirut condemned the shooting, saying Palestinians were not fighting Jews but “fana-~ tic, racist Zionists.”

The P.L.O. news agency Wafa quoted the spokesman as saying that since Palestinians had suffered from “massacres and attempted genocide, we are specially determined not to act in the manner of our aggressors.” “We express our deep regret for the innocent victims (of the Paris incident) and we affirm our determination to confront all attempts to distort the true nature of our struggle and cause,” said the spokesman. - *

The Israeli Embassy .said that a recent upsurge of attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets in France had come against a background of anti-Semitic propaganda. Yesterday’s attack came after two small bomb incidents in Paris over the weekend, both aimed at a shop an a bank with Jewish connections'. No-one was injured, but Action Directe claimed responsibility. The’worst previous attack against a Jewish target was the bombing of a synagogue in the Rue Copernic in ceri trap Paris in October, 1980, when four people, died and nine were injured.

Oyer the last, nine months dozens of bombs have. exploded in Paris, blamed variously on Armenian,. Palestinian, .Syrian; Israeli as .well as French Leftist and Right-' ist organisations. <

There has also been a spate - of "assassinations, with dmJAmerican -diplomat, an Israeli diplomat and a senior Palestinian among those killed. -

The police have’ .now branded’Paris the terrorist capital .of’Europe. ■ ,