Blackmailers threaten bombing campaign on French railways

[Flagg]

BLACKMAILERS THREATEN BOMBING CAMPAIGN ON FRENCH RAILWAYS

PARIS, March 3 (AFP) - The French government is being blackmailed by a previously-unknown group which has planted at least one bomb on the country's railway system and is demanding a ransom of more than five million dollars, the interior ministry said Wednesday.
Since December a group calling itself AZF has sent six letters to President Jacques Chirac and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, condemning France's political and economic establishment and threatening to explode 10 bombs on the railways unless the money is paid.
The government said it is taking the threat seriously and has activated the anti-terrorist section of the police as well as the domestic intelligence agency DST. A judicial investigation has been set up under the country's top anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere.
No group called AZF is known to the authorities, but it may be significant that AZF was the name of a chemical factory that blew up in the southern city of Toulouse in September 2001, killing 30 people and injuring around 1,000 others. The accident caused enormous local anger.
Police said there was not believed to be any link with Islamic terrorism.
The first letter, received on December 14, contained a series of denunciations of "politicians more pre-occupied with themselves than with the state ... a corrupt economy ... and a reductive education system" and ended with the words, "You will hear from us again soon."
In subsequent messages AZF described itself as a "pressure group of a terrorist nature." It said that 10 devices had been planted across the railway network, and that these had been fitted with timers to go off at intervals unless four million dollars and one million euros were handed over.
A letter received on February 21 indicated that police would find a bomb planted by the Paris-to-Toulouse railway line at a point in central France. "After tests the device was shown to be dangerous in as much as it could have smashed the track," the interior ministry said.




http://www.ttc.org/pa40303a.htm

[soup]

1. Link, please?

never mind, it's there now.

thanks.

[soup]

2. the AZF explosion on September 21, 2001

A huge explosion ripped through AZF (Azote de France) fertiliser factory in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Toulouse, southwest of France, at 10:15 am, last Friday 21 September 2001. For the moment, 31people are reported dead The total number of injuries is said to be 2,442. More than 350 people were in the plant at the time (266 AZF employees and 100 subcontractors).

The explosion had occurred in a warehouse in which granular ammonium nitrate was stored flat, separated by partitions. The amount is said to be between 200 to 300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, which is used to make fertilisers. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Paris ruled out a criminal attack, saying the explosion had been caused by an accident following an "incident in the handling of products". The exact cause remains unknown.
http://www.uneptie.org/pc/apell/disasters/toulouse/home.html

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Are the authorities actually going to pay the ransom? Doesn't that quite often turn into a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation?

Scary.