Le Pen plays up Orly attack

PARIS — France’s presidential election campaign is taking note of an attack on a military patrol at Paris’ Orly Airport by a suspected Islamic extremist who was shot dead by soldiers.

Most notably, the party of far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen sought to make political hay from Saturday’s attack, accusing previous administrations and Socialist President Francois Hollande’s current government of being weak in the face of security threats.

France’s military is on the front line of the fight against terrorism, one of the biggest challenges for the country’s next president. French troops are engaged in operations against Islamic extremism in Syria, Iraq and Africa’s Sahel region as well as in France itself since terror attacks in 2015. stupid mistake, according to Molins, the prosecutor.

“He called me at seven, eight in the morning and said, ‘There you go, Papa.’ He was extremely angry. Even his mother couldn’t understand him,” the man identified as the father said on Europe 1. “He told me: ‘I ask for your forgiveness. I’ve screwed up with a gendarme.’”

A subsequent police search of Belgacem’s flat found cocaine, Molins said.

Belgacem had been flagged as having been radicalized during a spell in detention in 2011-2012, Molins said.

His house was among dozens searched in November 2015 in the immediate aftermath of suicide bomb-and-gun attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.

The Orly attack forced both of the airport’s terminals to shut down and evacuate, sent passengers and workers fleeing in panic and trapped hundreds of others aboard planes that had just landed.

According to the soldiers, the attacker yelled: “Put down your weapons! Put your hands on your head! I am here to die for Allah. Whatever happens, there will be deaths,” Molins said.

The drama, which caused no injuries except for the light wound to the traffic police officer, further rattled France, which remains under a state of emergency after attacks the past two years that have killed 235 people.