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John Kerry



John Kerry shows solidarity with France after Paris attacks









US secretary of state arrives in France ‘to share big hug with Paris’ amid criticism of US absence from Charlie Hebdo rally














French president François Hollande greets John Kerry at the Elysee palace in Paris, on Friday. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA




Julian Borger in Paris and agencies


Friday 16 January 2015 04.01 EST







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Police have arrested a dozen people suspected of helping the Islamist militant gunmen carry out last week’s Paris killings, the city prosecutor’s office said as the US secretary of state, John Kerry, arrived in France for talks.
The arrests came after Belgian police killed two men who opened fired on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group, while German police said they had arrested two people following a raid on 11 properties linked to radical Salafists.
Centred on the southern Paris suburbs, including the Montrouge area where a police officer was killed in the attacks, the French arrests were made in connection with suspected “logistical support” for the shootings, an official said.
Seventeen victims and the three attackers died in three days of violence in Paris last week that began with an assault on the offices of satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Paris’s Gare de l’Est train station was evacuated at 8am local time (0700 GMT) on Friday after an alert but reopened about an hour later, the SNCF state railway said, without giving further details. Media reports said there had been a bomb threat.
All three gunmen were later shot dead by police.
Kerry was in Paris on Friday to meet French leaders and deliver a speech at Paris city hall in a visit aimed at making up for the absence of senior US officials at Sunday’s mass rally in defiance of the terrorist attacks.
At an early-morning meeting at the foreign ministry with his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius, Kerry explained he had been unable to come on Sunday because of a previously arranged trip to India.
“It’s good to be with you,” Kerry told Fabius. “We have a lot to talk about.” Over the course of the day he was also due to meet President François Hollande and the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
Kerry had said the hastily arranged trip was to “share a big hug for Paris” in the wake of the terror attacks, but he landed in the French capital on Thursday night as the violence spread north to Belgium. A visit that was intended to be commemorative and symbolic appeared likely to become urgent and operational as European and US officials seek to contain the spread of jihadist attacks in the west.
The visit was organised after the White House admitted it had made a mistake in not dispatching a senior figure to Paris where 40 other world leaders took to the streets in solidarity with a million protesters after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
Kerry will deliver some of his speech at the Paris city hall in French and then introduce the veteran American singer, James Taylor, most famous for the song You’ve Got a Friend.
“My visit to France is basically to share a big hug for Paris and express the affection of the American people for France and for our friends there who have been through a terrible time,” the secretary of state said in Bulgaria, before taking off for Paris.
He arrived hours after the funerals of five of the victims of the attacks, including two of the country’s best-known cartoonists, Georges Wolinski and Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac, and Franck Brinsolaro, the police guard at the Charlie Hebdo offices, who were killed on Wednesday 7 January when they were attacked by two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, armed with assault rifles.
Sunday’s mass rally was attended by leaders from around Europe and the Middle East, but even though the US attorney general, Eric Holder, was in Paris for talks on counter-terrorism he did not attend the march. The absence of a top-level American leader triggered a political row in Washington, but it was scarcely noticed at first in Paris.
“It was not really issue in France until it became a row in America. No one drew attention to the absence of a senior American,” said Bruno Tertrais, a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “Maybe Obama should be more worried about that – that nobody noticed.”



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