FRANCE: Killer dies in rocket-launcher duel with Police (9/5/2001)

Josey1

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 04 2001 Killer dies in rocket-launcher duel FROM CHARLES BREMNER IN PARIS A DRUG-dealer armed with a rocket launcher was shot dead by French police after he challenged them to a duel at the end of an all-night gunfight. Saphir Bghouia, 25, was killed by a police team on Sunday morning after using a Kalashnikov assault rifle to kill an aide to the Mayor of B?ziers and hitting two police cars with rounds from a Russian-made rocket launcher. An accomplice was still at large last night. Four officers in one car escaped injury because the rocket failed to explode after it struck the boot, sending the vehicle leaping into the air. The other car, pulverised in the explosion outside a police station, was empty. Police chased Bghouia around the town through the night while he harangued them over his mobile phone, shouting Islamic slogans. Eventually he challenged them to face him in a "man-to-man" duel. The police accepted in a ploy to lure him to an unpopulated area. They arranged to meet him in the car park of an exhibition centre in mid-morning. Masked officers from the national police intervention force shot Bghouia dead as he aimed his rocket launcher and an assault rifle at them after getting out of his car. "We got the impression that he came to die in our arms," an officer said yesterday. Bghouia had believed that Jean Farret, the mayoral aide, was a police officer when he shot him because he was sitting in a car with a blue light on the roof. France was shocked by the use of military weapons by a man who was known only as a troublemaker from an immigrant-dominated council estate of a provincial town. He had convictions for car theft and petty drug-dealing. The all-night confrontation, which began with a gang fight between North African immigrants and Romanies, heightened alarm about rising crime and the increasing use of violence against the police. Five officers have been killed in separate incidents this year. Police said that arsenals of assault rifles, grenades and anti-tank rockets were spreading among the youths of the housing estate ghettoes because of a plentiful supply from the wars of former Yugoslavia and Chechnya. Kalashnikov Russian assault rifles were selling for ?300 on the black market, compared with ?3,000 only two years ago. Rocket launchers were available for a few hundred pounds. The gunfight brought demands yesterday for a crackdown on criminals. President Chirac telephoned Raymond Couderc, Mayor of B?ziers, to express his horror about the shootings. Daniel Vaillant, the Interior Minister, flew to B?ziers and said: "Weapons of war must only be held by the military. All others must be eradicated." M Couderc, a conservative, said yesterday that his city had fallen victim to "acts of war like in Palestine or in the former Yugoslavia". He called on the Socialist-led Government of Lionel Jospin to mount a three-month police clampdown in his city to reassure residents. Leaders of the hardline parties of the Right called for tougher action against gangs that have made no-go areas out of the North Africandominated estates on the outskirts of cities. President Chirac and M Jospin have made crime the leading issue as they campaign for support before their expected contest for the presidency in elections next April. A rash of statistics and media reporting has increased the sense that the country is suffering a crime wave, especially in Paris and the big southern cities. Paris reported a 41 per cent rise in muggings and other robberies with violence in the first six months of this year. In July M Chirac blamed the Government for being soft on crime, saying: "The French are afraid. We have reached a point which is intolerable." Senior strategists in the Socialist Party were said yesterday to have concluded that the law and order issue could cost M Jospin and his team the presidential and subsequent parliamentary elections unless they take effective action.