France mosques targetted after mag killings

PARIS: Muslim places of worship in two French towns were fired upon overnight, hours after the deadly assault on a satirical newspaper that killed 12 people, prosecutors said on Thursday. No casualties were reported.
Three blank grenades were thrown at a mosque shortly after midnight in the city of Le Mans, west of Paris. A bullet hole was also found in a window of the mosque.
In the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France, several shots were fired in the direction of a Muslim prayer hall shortly after evening prayers. The hall was empty, the local prosecutor said.
An explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in the eastern French town of Villefranche-sur-Saone on Thursday morning also left no casualties. Local prosecutors have described it as a “criminal act.”
On the southern edge of Paris, an assailant opened fire on a police officer early Thursday, killing her and injuring a nearby street sweeper before fleeing, officials and a witness said. France’s interior minister cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
The attacker in the pre-dawn shooting Thursday remained at large, said French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. It was not immediately clear whether the attack was linked to the assault on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in which two police officers were among the dead.
In the Thursday shooting, Cazeneuve said, the officer had stopped to investigate a traffic accident when the firing started. Paris police said the second victim was a street sweeper. The officer later died of her injuries, said Emmanuel Cravelo of the Alliance police union.
“There was an officer in front of a white car and a man running away who shot,” said Ahmed Sassi, who saw the shooting from his home nearby.
Sassi said the shooter wore dark clothes but no mask. “It didn’t look like a big gun because he held it with one hand,” Sassi said.
Cazeneuve left an emergency government meeting to travel to the scene of the latest shooting. France is on its highest level of alert after the deadly attacks at Charlie Hebdo’s central Paris offices

Call against terrorism
Amid the tensions, France’s main Islamic groups urged Muslims across the country to observe a minute of silence on Thursday and for imams to condemn terrorism.
The groups called on “Muslim citizens of France to observe a minute of silence today at midday (1100 GMT), along with the rest of the nation, in memory of the victims of terrorism.”
The appeal — issued by Muslim assemblies from across France — also called on imams at Friday prayers to “condemn the violence and the terrorism with maximum firmness.”
Muslim citizens were also asked to join “in massive numbers” a national day of solidarity on Sunday where demonstrators are expected to take to the streets of towns across France.
Police were frantically hunting two men who fled Paris on Wednesday after gunning down 12 people in an attack on Charlie Hebdo, apparently in retaliation for the magazine’s defiant stance in publishing cartoons they deemed offensive to Islam.

Unfazed, magazine to reopen
Despite losing most of its staff in the attack, Charlie Hebdo will come out as scheduled next week, one of its surviving staffers told AFP on Thursday.
Charlie Hebdo will publish next Wednesday to defiantly show that “stupidity will not win,” said columnist Patrick Pelloux, adding that the remaining staff will soon meet.
“It’s very hard. We are all suffering, with grief, with fear, but we will do it anyway because stupidity will not win,” he said.
He added that the publication would have to be put together outside Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters which were not accessible following the massacre.
Twelve people, including five cartoonists, were killed in Wednesday’s attack that also left two policemen dead.