No Peace: France Has Had Consistent Islamic Attacks Since January

GettyImages-497051078
Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images

Multiple attacks which claimed at least 120 lives in Paris are the latest in a string of incidents in France this year with suspected links to radical Islam.

January 7-9: Two men armed with Kalashnikov rifles storm the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly magazine known for satirical caricatures of Islam and other religions. They kill 12 people including eight cartoonists and journalists as well as two police officers, before fleeing.

A policewoman is killed just outside Paris the following day in a shooting investigators later link to the Charlie Hebdo attack.

A gunman takes hostages at a Jewish supermarket, four of whom are killed. The Charlie Hebdo attackers and the hostage-taker are killed in separate shootouts with police.

An armoured vehicle of the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) arrives near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris, early on November 14, 2015

– February 3: Three soldiers guarding a Jewish community centre in Nice on the French Riviera, are attacked by a knife-wielding man. The 30-year-old assailant, Moussa Coulibaly, from a Parisian suburb, is arrested. In custody, he expresses his hatred for France, the police, the military and Jews.

– April 19: Sid Ahmed Ghlam, an Algerian IT student, is arrested in Paris on suspicion of killing a woman who was found shot dead in the passenger seat of her car, and of planning an attack on a church in the Paris suburb of Villejuif. Prosecutors say they found documents about Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State at his home, and that he had been in touch with a suspected jihadist in Syria about an attack on a church.

– June 26: Yassin Salhi, 35, kills and beheads his boss Herve Cornara and displays the severed head on the fence of a gas plant surrounded by Islamic flags. He tries to blow up the factory at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in southeast France, but is arrested.

A city adivsory sign reading ‘Paris Shootings: We ask you to stay at home and await instructions from the authorities’, pictured in Paris on November 14, 2015

– July 13: Four young men aged 16 to 23, including a former soldier, are arrested on charges of planning an attack on a military camp to behead an officer in the name of jihad. They proclaim allegiance to Islamic State.

– August 21: Two off-duty US servicemen and a friend prevent a bloodbath on a high-speed Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris, tackling a man who opened fire on passengers. He was armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an automatic pistol, and a box-cutter. One passenger sustains a gun injury, and another a knife wound.

The gunman is identified as 25-year-old Moroccan national Ayoub El Khazzani, known to intelligence services for links to radical Islam.

– November 10: French authorities say they have arrested a 25-year-old man with links to an Islamic State jihadist in Syria over a plot to attack military personnel at a naval base. Monitored by intelligence agencies for a months, he had tried to obtain material for carrying out the attack in Toulon in the southeast of the country.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.