Being Vigilant

The French government is taking exceptional precautions on New Year's Eve. The unusual measures are a reflection of the dangers they perceive, but rarely admit to openly. This article is from Libération:

Seven thousand men will be mobilized in France to reenforce the usual deployment on New Year's Eve, announced Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie.

The government had already decided to reenforce security in the big cities on December 17, following the discovery of explosives with no detonator in the Printemps department store in Paris.

Note: The event in question took place on December 16 when the police, alerted by a letter signed by the "Afghan Revolutionary Front", found 5 sticks of dynamite in the public toilets of the department store. In their letter they demanded the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan before the end of February 2009, "otherwise we will strike again in your capitalist department stores and this time without giving you warning." (Source: 20 Minutes)

More than 700 police and gendarmes guarded the department stores and public places as part of the Vigipirate plan. This brought the total number of men deployed to 2,200. The Vigipirate plan has been at Level Red - the next-to-last level in the prevention strategy - since July 2005, with different adaptations.

Note: Vigipirate is their alert system against terrorist activities. The levels are yellow, orange, red and scarlet.

"The investigators have fingerprints and images from the surveillance cameras in and around the department store. Identifying them represents long hours of work," explains Michèle Alliot-Marie, with regard to the investigation on the explosives. "Considering the nature of these explosives and the absence of any detonator, the perpetrators of this act apparently did not intend to cause damage or to harm anyone. Still they must be identified and prosecuted," she said.

For the Interior Minister, "the most worrisome thing today is Islamist terrorism."

"It represents a real and constant threat, not greater than in other countries, but not less either. We must be permanently on the alert. That is what our intelligence services are doing," she stressed.

Note: The article from 20 Minutes, linked above, also includes this information:

(...) Afghanistan is the key location in the war against terrorism. The ties with cells of the Maghreb are strong. Last July 1, Abdelmalek Droukdal, the head of al-Qaida in the Maghreb, explained to the New York Times that the countries engaged on Afghan soil could beome targets of retaliation. On September 29, the war lord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, claimed responsibility for the ambush where 10 French soldiers were killed on August 18, and spoke of more reprisals against the "occupation." On November 17, in a video probably made in August, a Taliban chief, Farouq Akhoun Zadeh, threatened to attack France.

Another article from 20 Minutes, dated December 22, posits the hypothesis of a lone perpetrator belonging to the "extreme Right":

The analysis of the vocabulary used in the text of the letter is orienting (the police) towards the extreme Right. "But it remains uncertain," admits a source close to the investigation.

(...) the police feel they could be dealing with an individual with the same profile as a member of the Anti-Radar Front National (FNAR), who had blown up several radar systems between 2007 and 2008. (...) A suspect, caught with a "strange bag", and known to be a right-wing extremist, was interrogated at length and released.

Note: I've never heard of the FNAR. The radar systems in question are placed along highways to track down speeding motorists. The French in general object to them. The French conservatives object to them on grounds that the government exerts too much money and energy to capture speeders, while being lax and indifferent to criminals.