France’s Interior Ministry confirmed last week that the police and security services were on full alert after a series of threats by an unknown group to blow up railway tracks countrywide unless it was paid a multimillion-pound ransom.
To prove its threats were serious the group — which calls itself AZF after a chemical factory that blew up in southern France in September 2001 — directed police on February 21 to a time bomb buried under a railway line near Limoges in the south-west.
The device, made of diesel fuel and nitrate and fitted with an advanced timer, was ”complex, efficient, and in full working order”, a ministry spokesperson said.
The Interior Ministry asked all media on Tuesday not to report the attempted blackmail. But a local paper, the Dépèche du Midi, ignored the request and published details of the threat, which were then broadcast on TV and radio.
Judicial sources said Michel Debacq, the head of the anti-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor’s office, had been fired for not warning his superiors quickly enough about the threat.
The first letter from the group was sent to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac on December 11.
It described AZF as a ”secular pressure group of a terrorist nature”.
There were further letters on January 29 and February 17, demanding Sarkozy put a message in Liberation newspaper to prove his good faith. The message appeared on February 19.
In subsequent letters the group demanded $4-million and â,¬1-million in exchange for revealing the locations of up to 10 bombs it said were hidden in railway tracks around the country. — Â