London, Two months after he was shot dead by French special forces, a 23-year-old Algerian-origin terrorist was found to have been plotting to attack the Indian embassy in Paris on the direction of his Taliban handlers in Pakistan. Quoting sources from the French Internal Intelligence and the Special Forces, Le Monde reported that Mohamed Merah's Taliban handlers in Pakistan had tasked him to attack the Indian mission. "That was the target given him by the Taliban who prepared him for jihad during his training in Pakistan in the summer of 2011," the paper reported. Merah was killed after police and special forces laid an almost 32-hour siege of his apartment in Toulouse, after his armed attacks on a Jewish school and killing of army personnel outside their barracks on March 15. During the siege, the terrorist had long chats with the policemen surrounding his house, which were recorded and are now part of the judicial dossier. Merah told cops that he had dropped the plan to attack the Indian mission due to difficulty of the enterprise . He also said that he had attended jihad camps in Pakistan and undergone al-Qaida training. Merah had long been known to the French ...
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Tehran, Iran has halted its limited oil sales to France and Britain in retaliation for a phased European Union ban on Iranian oil that is yet to take full effect, the oil ministry said on Sunday. "Oil sales to British and French companies have ceased," spokesman Ali Reza Nikzad Rahbar said in a statement on the ministry's official website. "We have taken steps to deliver our oil to other countries in the place of British and French companies," he said. The decision was not expected to have a big impact. France last year bought only 3% of its oil - 58,000 barrels a day - from the Islamic republic , and Britain was believed to be no longer importing Iranian oil. But it was seen as a warning shot to other EU nations that are bigger consumers of Iranian oil, including Italy, Spain and Greece. Although those countries were not affected by Iran's announcement, they are included in an EU decision to stop buying Iranian oil that was announced last month and which will take full effect from July. According to the International Energy Agency, Italy sourced 13% of its oil, or 185,000 barrels per day, from Iran, while Spain imported 12% or 161,000 bpd, and Greece bought 30% of ...
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Paris, Shamed former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was stopped by police while they were trying to ‘clean up’ a Paris park notorious for transvestite prostitutes, a French minister has claimed. Frances Interior Minister Claude Gueant said officers patrolling the Bois du Boulogne spoke to Strauss-Kahn five years ago. Gueant told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that no action was taken in the matter. “But there was no action taken over this matter. He wasn''t framed by the police. He was not being followed. After all, it''s not the police''s fault if he was there that night,” he said. According to the Daily Mail, Strauss-Kahn admitted that he had been stopped by police in the park, which is near his home, but said that he was with his wife, the former TV presenter Anne Sinclair. His lawyer Richard Malka said it was nothing more than a ‘routine check’, and added that during 15 years of living near the park, the couple had been ‘stopped several ...
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