France's President Francois Hollande said his government would do all that was needed to make sure law and order prevailed after rioting overnight in the northern city of Amiens.
Hollande said, "Interior Minister Manuel Valls will go to Amiens immediately ... to say there once again that the state will mobilise all its resources to combat this violence. Our priority is security which means that the next budget will include additional resources for the gendarmerie and the police."
Violent clashes between youths and riot police in the northern French city of Amiens have left 16 officers injured and several public buildings torched in some of the worst rioting in the area for years reopening the fraught political debate about France's troubled housing estates.
Rioting broke out on deprived estates in the north of the city at 9pm on Monday and raged until 4am. Around 100 youths set fire to cars, a nursery school and a youth centre as well as firing buckshot and projectiles at police officers, who saturated the streets with teargas as reinforcements arrived from neighbouring areas.
Amiens was a manufacturing city, lost many jobs in the 70s and 80s, got a lot of central govt money in the 90s for the university etc. but still has no real economic prospects for the working class majority population.
OSLO: Norwegian police and security services could have prevented all or part of an attack by far-right militant Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bombing and gun massacre last year, a government commission said on Monday.
Intelligence services could have learned about Breiviks plans months before the attack made him the worst mass killer in Norways peacetime history, the commissions report said. The government building he bombed should have been better protected and he should have been stopped before he gunned down dozens of victims, mostly teenagers, on an island as police struggled to find a working helicopter and a suitable boat.
All in all, July 22 revealed serious shortfalls in societys emergency preparedness and ability to avert threats, the commission said. The challenges turned out to be ascribable to leadership and communication to a far greater extent than to the lack of response personnel."
The government also could have allowed personal rights to own firearms. And concealed carry...
Breivik first detonated a fertilizer car bomb outside government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people, then traveled to the ruling Labour Partys summer camp on Utoeya island where he gunned down 69 victims unimpeded.
Authorities had become aware of his suspicious activities months before when he purchased items that could be used to make bombs but intelligence service failures meant he was not put on a watch list, the commission said in the 482-page report.
The government building should have been much better protected as it had been identified as a security risk years before. But government squabbling over minor details of the security measures needed meant little was done.
Once the bombing took place, a witnesss description of Breivik, which was phoned into police, was not passed on to officers in the field for 20 minutes. Police should have automatically activated drills meant to guard against multiple attacks but weak leadership and disorganization led to delays, the report said.
The military was not immediately informed, police could not find the helicopter, and its boat, intended to transport special forces to the island, could not carry the necessary load.
The authorities ability to protect the people on Utoeya island failed. A more rapid police operation was a realistic possibility. The perpetrator could have been stopped earlier on 22 July, the commission said.
The commissions finding are a major embarrassment for security forces but the justice minister and security chief at the time have both resigned since the attack while many of the senior police personnel involved have also been replaced.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday he took ultimate responsibility for the intelligence and police failures, after the publication of the report. It took too long to apprehend the perpetrator and the police should have been on Utoeya earlier. This is something I regret, he said.
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Posted by: Steve White ||
08/14/2012 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Intelligence services could have learned about Breiviks plans months before the attack
#2
Always some asshole who pope up and says "You could have stopped this".
OK asshole, if it COULD be stopped, WHY WASN'T IT.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
08/14/2012 11:36 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Simple. Nothing like that had ever happened in Norway. Makes it tough to get a 'crat to put some of his budget into preventing that which has never happened and therefore never will. You can't even get somebody to alternate pilot vacations, or keep an eye on the keys to the boat, or even where it is, or supposed to be, if they haven't been doing it already, to prevent that which has never happened and therefore never will.
You can't even get a procedure changed for intel to call the cops or vice versa. Not even a little not taped to the phone.
Never happened, not gonna happen, what's the big dea.?
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
08/14/2012 14:39 Comments ||
Top||
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France's President Francois Hollande said his government would do all that was needed to make sure law and order prevailed after rioting overnight in the northern city of Amiens.
