1 killed in French anti-extremist operation

A man was shot and fatally wounded Saturday in the eastern French city of Strasbourg while being arrested by police in a nationwide anti-terrorist operation, judicial and police sources said. President Francois Hollande had talks with Interior Minister Manuel Valls about the operation, which the Elysee Palace said netted seven people. Police sources said the sweep was directed at a suspected Salafist network and linked to an attack last month on a Jewish grocery near Paris. The roundup targeted suspects in several cities around France. Hollande stressed "the full determination of the state to protect French people against all forms of terrorist threats," the presidential palace said. According to initial reports, when police entered the suspect's home in Strasbourg he shot at them. The Elysee statement said he died as a result of return fire, without giving further details. But a source close to the inquiry said the 33-year-old man was seated on a couch in his living when the police entered and he fired several shots at them with a powerful handgun before he was killed. Three police were slightly wounded, one being hit in the head and another in the chest, but they were protected by their helmets and bullet-proof waistcoats. The dead man's woman companion was arrested. Another man arrested in the Paris suburbs was said to have been  armed and "dangerous" but did not use his weapon. Police swooped simultaneously in several cities, among them Cannes in the southeast, where a man was detained without offering resistance. The police operation was part of the investigation into an incident on September 19 when "a minimally powerful explosive" was hurled into a kosher grocery store in Sarcelles, in the Paris suburbs, a judicial source said. That incident left one person slightly injured but triggered strong reaction in the town's large Jewish community. A source close to the inquiry, asked about the readiness of extremists to carry out other attacks against places frequented by Jews, advised caution. But he said that the suspects had "a list of objectives" and the inquiry had to determine whether plans were well advanced or had simply been discussed among the suspects. The Interior Ministry meanwhile said Valls had postponed a trip to Qatar for a security fair in order to keep an eye on developments. Investigators have declined to link the Sarcelles attack to the recent anti-Islam film "Innocence of Muslims" which triggered global protests or the publication of cartoons of Prophet Mohammed by a satirical French weekly. Moshe Cohen-Sabban, a local Jewish community leader in Sarcelles, said after the incident that there were no "special" religious tensions in the working-class area with a population of about 60,000 and large numbers of Muslims and Jews, many of the latter immigrants from North Africa in the 1960s and their descendants. But the council representing Jewish institutions in France (CRIF) said it feared a link to the violence surrounding the anti-Islam film and Israel's ambassador to France, Yossi Gal, condemned the incident as an "anti-Semitic attack". It came during a busy period in the Jewish calendar, between the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement Yom Kippur.