France: Is Carlos Back?

The bombers strike again

Just as Frenchmen around the country were ringing in the new year, a bomb ripped through a first-class carriage on a Marseilles-Paris express train, killing three passengers and wounding more than a dozen. Then, only 16 minutes later and 120 miles to the south, in Marseilles’s St. Charles railway station, another tremendous explosion rocked the luggage office, shattering windows, carving out a crater three feet wide, and leaving two dead and 34 injured. Together with two recent explosions in fashionable Parisian restaurants, both blasts were apparently designed to protest the French role in the Middle East quagmire. Last week, as the entire country shook from the reverberations, several alarms were sounded, railway stations were evacuated, and riot policemen began patrolling high-speed trains.

The railway-station explosion occurred, perhaps not coincidentally, as President Francois Mitterrand delivered his annual New Year’s address on national TV. But the President showed no signs of flinching. “In Lebanon, where we are doing our job,” asserted Mitterrand, “they depend on us to save human lives. Once the mission is complete, our soldiers will come back here.” That unequivocal affirmation apparently created more tension than it defused. On the following day, a bomb shattered the French Cultural Center in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli.

At least five ideologically diverse groups promptly claimed “credit” for the bombings. From one of these groups re-emerged the Venezuelan terrorist Illitch Ramirez-Sánchez, better known as the infamous and long-sought “Carlos,” who in 1982 masterminded a previous French train bombing. His Organization of Armed Arab Struggle announced in several phone calls to the press that the bombings were in response to last November’s air raids on Shi’ite Muslim barracks in the ancient Lebanese city of Baalbek. At least 39 people died in those raids. But it is also possible that the most recent attacks were the work of the militant Shi’ite Islamic Jihad group. Ten days before the latest bombings, those extremists warned that unless the U.S. and French withdrew from Lebanon before the new year, they would “make the ground shake under their feet.”

Last week French authorities closed down the Islamic Center in Paris, an alleged meeting place for extremists, while bolstering security around embassies and government buildings, in airports and at borders. But still the nation remained apprehensive. Some of the groups seeking credit for the New Year’s bombings are doubtless bluffing. But eagerness to accept blame suggests a frightening readiness to earn it.