🚀 go-pugleaf

From: Habshi <Habshi@anon.com>
Subject: 10,000 buildings damaged in French blast blamed on terrorists
Date: Friday, October 05, 2001 6:49 AM

It really is time democracies protected themselves by
outlawing religious incitements to kill in the holy books . The scale
of killings is getting worse each time.

Terrorism link to French explosion

Islamist may have caused chemical blast

Jon Henley in Paris
Friday October 5, 2001
The Guardian

The French environment minister said yesterday a massive explosion
that destroyed a chemical plant in Toulouse last month, killing 29
people and injuring more than 2,000, could have been a terrorist
attack.
The remark by Yves Cochet followed the revelation that one of the men
found dead on the site of the AZF fertiliser plant in the southern
French city had a police record and known Islamic fundamentalist
sympathies.

While the Toulouse prosecutor heading the inquiry has consistently
said he is "99% certain" the blast was an accident, several leading
French scientists have pointed out that the chemical involved -
ammonium nitrate - is exceptionally stable and was highly unlikely to
have exploded spontaneously.

"A new piece of information reached us today which shows there might
have been a terrorist origin" to the blast, Mr Cochet said. But he
added the government was not ruling out any cause.

Judicial sources yesterday confirmed that police had identified one of
the dead inside the plant as Hassan Jandoubi, 35, a French national
born in Tunisia. He was reportedly dressed in several layers of
clothing "in the manner of kamikaze fundamentalists".

Jandoubi was known to police as the suspected ringleader of a gang
trafficking stolen cars between France and Germany. He was also an
active member of a mosque in the Toulouse suburbs where he was
"initiated to fundamentalism 10 months ago", a French news magazine
reported.

While he was allegedly one of a group of known Islamic radicals seen
celebrating last month's terror attacks in the US, his name does not
apparently feature on lists of fundamentalist terrorist suspects
maintained by Interpol, the French intelligence service and the
counter-espionage agency DST.

Jandoubi, who worked for a subcontractor responsible for maintaining
and loading the trucks that carried ammonium nitrate away from the
site, had started at the plant five days before the explosion.

Witnesses have told police that on September 20, the day before the
blast, they saw him arguing angrily with at least one truck driver who
had decorated his cabin with a miniature Stars and Stripes out of
sympathy with the victims of the September 11 attacks.

On the day of the blast, Jandoubi was working in hangar 10, 30 yards
from hangar 221 whose stock of 200-300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate
exploded at 10.17am. Windows were blown out in Toulouse city centre
three miles away, 10,000 buildings were damaged, 600 houses or
apartments destroyed, and 1,400 families left homeless. Nearly 400
people remain in hospital.

Police were initially intrigued by the fact that Jandoubi was found
with a mobile phone fitted with a stolen card. Their interest was
further aroused by his autopsy, carried out by a doctor who had worked
in the Middle East for the international aid organisation M�decins du
Monde and who noted that Jandoubi was wearing two pairs of trousers
and four pairs of underpants. The doctor said this reminded her "of
the apparel worn by some Islamic militants going into battle or on
suicide missions".


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