France to Deploy Thousands of Forces to Protect Jewish Schools and 'Sensitive Sites'

Paris: Seeking to reassure a jittery and unsettled population after last week's terrorist attacks, the French authorities said Monday that thousands of police officers and soldiers would be deployed to protect Jewish schools and other "sensitive sites," in one of the country's biggest peacetime security operations.

The Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said that 10,000 soldiers would be deployed by Tuesday evening, in what he called "the first mobilization on this scale on our territory."

Le Drian announced the measures after President Francois Hollande called an emergency meeting to fashion the government's response to the attacks. On Sunday, dozens of world leaders joined Hollande at the front of a march in Paris attended by more than 1 million people and intended as a show of unity and defiance.

The military deployment reflected France's readiness to commit its armed forces to resist Islamic militants within and beyond its borders. French aircraft have joined the US-led air campaign against militant forces in Iraq, and roughly 3,000 French soldiers are deployed in Africa in efforts to counter extremist groups in countries including Chad and Mauritania.

In addition to the military deployment, the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said Monday that 4,700 police officers would be posted to guard the country's 700 Jewish schools and other institutions after three days of bloodletting last week, when three assailants killed 17 people in attacks on targets including a satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, and a kosher supermarket.

Cazeneuve announced the new protections in an address to parents at a Jewish school south of Paris, according to French radio and news agencies.

All three attackers were killed in raids, but there is an abiding and deep concern here that "the threat is still present," as Le Drian put it.

The Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, speaking to BFM television, said earlier that one of the attackers, Amedy Coulibaly, "undoubtedly" had one or more accomplices, still at large and posing a continuing threat.

Coulibaly, who took hostages in a kosher supermarket on Friday, is suspected of having shot a police officer on Thursday. He claimed in a video released on Sunday that he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State militant group. Four Jewish shoppers, who were preparing for the Sabbath, were killed in the supermarket attack.

Surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the supermarket in a gesture of solidarity with French Jews on Monday. Many people waving Israeli flags gathered to cheer him, and some said they would be seeking to immigrate to Israel because they no longer felt safe in France.

Netanyahu was also present at the rally in Paris on Sunday along with leaders including the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas; Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain; and Chancellor Angel Merkel of Germany.

Turkey's state news agency on Monday quoted the country's Foreign Minister as saying that Hayat Boumeddiene, thought to be Coulibaly's companion, had entered Syria from Turkey on Thursday, the day before the kosher supermarket attack.

Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish Foreign Minister, told the state-run Anadolu Agency on Monday that Boumeddiene had arrived in Turkey from Madrid on January 2, and had stayed at a hotel in Istanbul.

On Sunday, a video emerged on the Internet showing Coulibaly describing his role in what he called a coordinated offensive to defend Islam, and urging young French Muslims to take up the fight.

The video surfaced as French news outlets, citing police sources, said that investigators had found a hideaway used by Coulibaly, 32, in preparation for the attacks, an apartment in the Gentilly suburb of Paris that was stocked with automatic weapons, detonators, cash and flags of the Islamic State.

Parts of the video appeared to have been produced by an accomplice after Coulibaly's death, as they alluded to information that emerged only after he died when the police stormed the kosher supermarket.

The tough French response played into an emerging and potentially divisive debate across Europe that pits civil liberties campaigners against the demands of security officials who cite the attacks as evidence of an urgent need to introduce stronger powers to monitor suspects.

Cazeneuve, the Interior Minister, said Sunday that the French government would seek greater authority to monitor the Internet for activity in support of terrorist or subversive activities.

Also on Sunday, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told the BBC that he favored the introduction of "more comprehensive" powers of surveillance.

British intelligence and security chiefs briefed Cameron on Monday on the implications of the Paris attacks for the authorities in London, which was the site of coordinated attacks on July 7, 2005.

The participants at the meeting agreed to "step up our efforts with other countries to crack down on the illegal smuggling of weapons across borders," a government spokesman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with department rules. "The Prime Minister also asked the police and military to continue to work closely together to ensure that the police can call on appropriate military assistance when required across the country."

At the Vatican on Monday, Pope Francis condemned the extremism behind the attacks, saying that religious fundamentalism "eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext."

In his annual speech to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, the Pope spoke of a "culture of rejection, which severs the deepest and most authentic human bonds, leading to the breakdown of society and spawning violence and death."

"Losing their freedom, people become enslaved, whether to the latest fads or to power, money or even deviant forms of religion," he added. "Violence is always the product of a falsification of religion, its use as a pretext for ideological schemes whose only goal is power over others."

The Pope also called on "religious, political and intellectual leaders, especially those of the Muslim community," to "condemn all fundamentalist and extremist interpretations of religion which attempt to justify such acts of violence."