Word: strasbourg
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...uprooted al-Qaeda networks in Europe. His arrest and extradition from Syria is a very big blow to jihadists," says one French counterterrorism official. The French say Arif, a veteran of Afghan and Chechen camps, is implicated in a foiled December 2000 plot to bomb the Christmas market outside Strasbourg Cathedral. Arif's alleged role involved recruiting, organizing and oversight. French antiterror magistrates Jean-Louis Bruguière and Jean-François Ricard are also holding Arif for alleged similar involvement with a Chechen-trained group arrested outside Paris in December 2002 that is suspected of planning a chemical...
...French are very territorial when it comes to champagne, ski resorts and, yes, pharmaceutical companies, which helps explain why the government strong-armed Sanofi-Synthelabo into sweetening a hostile bid for the Strasbourg-based Aventis--to create a French "national champion" in the pill market--and why the government warned Swiss drugmaker Novartis to stop fishing in the Rhine. Sanofi-Aventis will be the world's third largest pharmaceutical firm, after Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. But since the merger announcement, Sanofi's shares have tumbled, in part because investors think $66 billion is too high a price for Aventis, whose...
...laws require police to destroy files on individuals, further complicating operations and alienating allies. "It took us over a month to get German officials to approve certain requests," says a French counterterrorism official, recalling cooperation between France and Germany in 2000 to thwart a planned attack on the Strasbourg Christmas market by a Frankfurt-based cell. "And that was only after we'd provided clear, irrefutable proof France was being targeted for attack. It's really frustrating dealing with them." Manfred Murck, deputy director of the Hamburg office of the BfV, defends the federal system's advantages. It enhances local...
...Zubaydah, a Palestinian who acted as al-Qaeda's chief recruiter and puppet master of Europe-based terrorists until his arrest in Pakistan in March 2002. According to French antiterror officials, phone intercepts show Zubaydah telegraphed preparations for a foiled 2000 bombing of the Christmas market outside Strasbourg Cathedral and also used London-based clerics as intermediaries. Similarly, jailed Franco-Algerian Djamel Beghal, another Khalden trainee, told interrogators that Zubaydah personally sent him from Afghanistan in July 2001 to organize a kamikaze bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Paris, a plot undone by Beghal's arrest in Dubai...
...headstrong heroine, Salie, with a more than passing resemblance to herself. The character leaves her native Senegal for France where, after years of struggle and isolation, she eventually learns how to straddle the two worlds. (Diome herself left the Senegalese island of Niodior in 1994, and lives in Strasbourg.) Like her creator, Salie leaves behind a younger brother who yearns to join her, convinced that, even without papers, he can become a star football player if he can just reach French soil. As Salie tries to dissuade him with somber stories of the fate of other illegal immigrants, Diome exposes...