French Separatists Firebomb Store in Quebec

A separatist terrorist group early Wednesday firebombed a department store that posts bilingual signs, two days after a court ruled that signs in both French and English are legal, police said. No one was injured.

A police spokesman said one or two Molotov cocktails were thrown against the store window of a Zellers department store in the Montreal suburb of St. Laurent. No one was in the store at the time.

Police estimated smoke and water damage at $10,000.

In a message sent to a French-language radio station, the separatist Quebec Liberation Front, known by the French acronym FLQ, claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Ruling on Signs

The firebombing was the second violent incident since the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled Monday that bilingual commercial signs are legal in the province of Quebec.

The court ruled that some sections of Bill 101, Quebec’s language law, are unconstitutional because they violate freedom of expression by banning the use of any language other than French in commercial signs.

The court ruled that all public signs in Quebec must be in French but also can be posted in another language.

The ruling has upset hard-line Quebec nationalists who want French to be the only language officially recognized in the province.

On Tuesday, vandals broke a window at an auto parts store and spray-painted the letters FLQ on the store’s windows.

Police Surprised

Police officials expressed surprise at the involvement of the Quebec Liberation Front in these incidents.

“There has been no indication until now that the FLQ was still alive,” a police spokesman said. “In recent years, we’d heard nothing of them.”

The Quebec Liberation Front, which wants Quebec to separate from the rest of Canada, is associated with one of the most violent periods in Canadian history.

In the 1960s, it claimed responsibility for several bombings of government property and in October, 1970, it kidnaped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s labor minister.

Stuffed in Trunk

Laporte’s bullet-riddled body was found stuffed in the trunk of a car two days after Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to deal with the crisis by giving police and the military sweeping powers of arrest and detention.

Cross was released unharmed almost two months later in exchange for his captors’ safe passage out of the country. All the FLQ members involved in the two kidnapings eventually returned or were caught and sent to prison. All have since been released.