The US secretary of state, John Kerry, declared the “profound emotion” of his country for France on Friday, as French police arrested a dozen people suspected of helping the gunmen who carried out last week’s terror attacks in Paris.
Kerry described the attacks as a “living nightmare” and said he wanted to “share a hug with the whole of Paris and the whole of France”.
His hastily arranged visit came after the White House admitted it made a mistake in not dispatching a senior figure to Paris for the mass rally in the French capital on Sunday.
The “republican march”, organised in defiance of the terrorist attacks and as a show of national and international solidarity, was attended by 40 other world leaders and was the biggest public demonstration in Paris since the city’s liberation in 1944. Kerry told his French counterpart Laurent Fabius that he was unable to attend because of a trip to India.
He told the French president, François Hollande, at the Elysée: “We share the pain of the French people”.
As Kerry’s plane was landing in Paris on Thursday night for his symbolic fence-mending visit, the spotlight on terrorist violence had moved north as Belgian authorities claimed to have foiled an alleged Islamist plot to kill police.
Later on Friday, Kerry was met at city hall by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo for a joint declaration of solidarity. “I wanted to tell you personally of the horror, the revulsion all Americans felt at the cowardly and despicable attack and assault on innocent victims and fundamental values,” Kerry said.
In a declaration that took in the Marquis of Lafayette, who supported America in its War of Independence, the French Resistance and the Allied D-Day landings, Kerry hailed France as “America’s oldest ally” and mentioned the “close and inescapable historic ties” between the two countries.
Switching effortlessly between French and English, Kerry said: “What the extremists, the terrorists don’t understand, will never understand, is that bravery and decency will never bow down to intimidation and terror.”
He spoke of the “ordinary men and women who became suddenly heroes”, paying tribute to Lassana Bathily, 24, the Muslim from Mali who saved Jewish shoppers by hiding them in a freezer during an attack on a supermarket, and Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim police officer gunned down during the raid on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Bathily, invited to the ceremony along with police representatives, victims’ relatives and a group of secondary schoolchildren, is to be awarded French nationality for his actions next week.
Kerry concluded: “Over and above the passionate and complex debates about the reasons for the tragedy, above politics, religion, satire … is another common hope, the hope of creating a world based on love and not on hate. What the terrorists fear most is tolerance, liberty, truth … but we simply will not descend into despair”.
After his address, Kerry made an unexpected announcement that he had brought the celebrated American singer James Taylor to France with him.
Amid the gilt and crystal chandeliers, Taylor took up his guitar and gave a rendition of You’ve Got a Friend - adding in “Ton ami est la” - while Mayor Hidalgo held the microphone.
The burials of three more members of the Charlie Hebdo team took place on Friday, with bagpipes playing Amazing Grace ringing out at the funeral of Stephane Charbonnier, alias Charb, the editor-in-chief.
The family of the Algerian subeditor killed in the attack said he never sought the public spotlight. “He wanted to stay anonymous but his death has made him famous,” Djafar, the cousin of Mustapha Ourrad, told AFP. “He wanted to be forgotten but we will never forget him.”
The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, ruled out a link between the terrorist network foiled by Belgian police on Thursday and the bloody attacks in Paris last week.
Valls said investigators had made “no direct connection” between the alleged Islamist cells but were sharing information.
“The link that exists is the attempts by terrorists to attack our values, our citizens. We’re faced with the same threat and the same particularly high level of risk, but we will act with all countries concerned by this threat with the same determination,” he said. He added that the French state would “act relentlessly” to root out the terrorists.
Valls said a spate of arrests in France on Friday morning in connection with last week’s attacks showed “the determination of the state and the forces of law and order”.
Eight men and four women are being questioned about whether they offered “logistic support” – namely weapons and vehicles - to Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo attack, which killed 12 people, and Amedy Coulibaly, who carried out two separate attacks, killing a female police officer in one and four people at a Jewish supermarket the following day.
German police said they had arrested two people on Friday, following a raid on 11 properties linked to suspected Muslim extremists.
James Taylor performance
It was an unexpected, and somewhat bizarre scene in the Salon des Arcades, as Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo held a microphone while American singer James Taylor strummed his guitar and warbled: “You’ve got a friend – ton ami est la.”
Couldn’t John Kerry – who was closer to Taylor on the podium in the glittering and gilt City Hall salon – have helped the man he described as “my friend from Massachusetts”, by holding the mic?
As the ceremony ended, some French media offered a possible explanation for the scene they agreed was “rather strange”.
Socialist Hidalgo, they ventured, may have been trying to make up for the breach of protocol for which she was lambasted as being “impolite” and, even more damagingly in republican France, “regal” after failing to hold the Queen’s umbrella during a royal visit to Paris after the 70th anniversary commemorations of D-day in June last year.
It wasn’t just that Hidalgo left the Queen holding her own umbrella; Madame La Maire came in for even more stick because she had an official factotum to hold one for her.
“We can hardly believe what we saw,” lambasted Le Point magazine.
“Elizabeth II, 88-years-old and monarch for 62 years, holds her own umbrella, while Anne Hidalgo, not year 55-years-old and mayor for just over two months needs a factotum to hold hers ... Shocking!”, the magazine declared.
