France Arrests Tunisian Bomb Suspects

French judicial authorities believe they have come close to cracking the Djerba bomb blast case, which struck terror in the hearts of European tourists earlier this year.

The tragedy took place on April 11 when a gas truck rammed into North Africa’s oldest synagogue, El Ghriba, on the southern Tunisian island of Djerba and charred a busload of visiting European tourists. Fourteen Germans, five Tunisians and a Frenchman were killed in the explosion.

Relatives of killer truck driver held

On Tuesday, the French interior ministry said that at least eight people had been arrested in connection with the Djerba blast.

"Counter-intelligence agents aided by local special police units conducted searches and arrested eight people at Saint-Pirest an Benisieux," a ministry statement said, naming two low-income suburbs of the industrial city of Lyon.

The ministry statement also said that documents seized during the arrests in Lyon’s suburbs seemed to make a direct link between the suspects and the April 11 bombing.

French judicial sources have said that those arrested included friends and family of the 24-year-old truck driver, Nizar Nouar, who drove the gas tanker into the synagogue on Djerba.

The arrests of Nouar’s father, mother, brother and brother-in-law as well as two friends of the family came after France’s leading anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere ordered a probe into relatives of the truck driver.

Al Qaeda hand in Djerba blast?

Shortly after the attack on Djerba in April, the Al-Qaeda network claimed responsibility for the blast in a recorded message aired by the Arabic language news network, Al Jazeera. The network said the message came from Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti-based al Qaeda spokesman.

Ghaith said the tourist attack on the island of Djerba on April 11 was carried out by a man, "who could not see his brothers in Palestine being killed, slaughtered, their blood spilled and honor violated and he looks around him and sees Jews in the city of Djerba wandering and enjoying and practicing their rituals at will."

Following up on the al Qaeda link, French intelligence officials now suspect that the terrorist network recruited young men in the suburbs around French cities, in particular Lyon, which is home to large numbers of disaffected and unemployed young North Africans who feel isolated from French society.

Even Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States in connection with the September 11 attacks in America, grew up in southern France in a family of Moroccan immigrants.

German intelligence officials vindicated

The news of the eight arrests in France in connection with the Djerba blast will also be welcome to German intelligence officials who flew to Djerba in the aftermath of the blast to assist Tunisian authorities with the investigation.

Even as Tunisian officials were reportedly uncooperative and insisting that the attack was an accident, German officials suspected an al Qaeda link and arrested a man in the German city of Duisburg later in April, who is believed to have had telephonic contact with the man who crashed the truck shortly before the explosion.

The arrests in France on Tuesday coincided with the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, August Hanning’s statement that tourist sites were under growing threat of terrorism.

"We have already seen in recent months more and more information that tourist centers are under threat. It is because they cannot be guarded," he said in an interview with ZDF television.

Germany a terrorist target: intelligence chief

Hanning said that Berlin’s support for the US war on terrorism had made Germany a target for future attacks.

"The German chancellor declared unlimited solidarity with the Americans after September 11. That has had consequences," the intelligence chief said.

"We are playing an important part in the stabilization of Afghanistan, and that brings us into al Qaeda’s line of sight," Hanning said. "We must assume that there is a threat in Europe and also in Germany."

Germany is also holding the world’s first trial of a suspect accused of aiding last year’s September 11 attacks in the United States that killed around 3,000 people.