Expatica: Algerian group calls France 'enemy number one'

Algerian group calls France ‘enemy number one’

PARIS, Sept 27 (AFP) – An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as “enemy number one”, intelligence officials said Tuesday.

“The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr,” the group’s leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

“France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community,” he was quoted as saying.

France was mentioned 15 times in the text, and the Algerian government was also targeted, the officials said.

Nine people detained in a series of raids west of Paris Monday are suspected members of the GSPC, officials have said. They were being questioned for a second day Tuesday at the headquarters of the DST domestic intelligence agency.

Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is “at a very high level… There are cells operating on our territory.”

The GSPC was created from a split in the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the main force in Algeria’s long insurgency which was also responsible for a series of bombings in France in 1995.

French authorities however state that there is no involvement of muslim militants in the riots. If that is the case, this statement of GSPC is an attempt to use these riots for their own purposes.