Paris Steps Up Patrols After Fatal Bombing

Above ground and below the streets of Paris, police and soldiers patrolled on Wednesday in increased numbers, checking identity papers and frisking some passersby as the government swiftly revived a bevy of anti-terrorism measures.

The increased security came one day after a bomb on a rapid transit train during evening rush hour killed two people and injured 88 others at a station on the Left Bank.

“Once again, Paris has been chosen as a target in the heart of its [France’s] capital,” Prime Minister Alain Juppe told the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. He restored a full program of anti-terrorist measures applied after similar attacks last year, but many Parisians were fatalistic about their government’s power to counter any future threat.

“We live with it,” Jacques Dupont, 35, who works gluing posters to the walls of the Metro, said at the underground railway’s station at the Place de la Concorde, where reinforced patrols of officers carrying submachine guns strolled the platforms Wednesday morning. “I spend 12 hours a day in the Metro. If you think about it, you’ll put a gun to your head.”

Under the government’s anti-terrorism strategy, police reinforcements and army detachments were rapidly deployed at public places in the capital and elsewhere in France.

Two hundred soldiers from infantry and hussar regiments were ordered to patrol train stations in Paris, and 300 marines were flown from Frejus on the Riviera to the military airport of Villacoublay near Versailles for similar duty.

“We must be alert to the possibility that this was not an isolated attack,” government spokesman Alain Lamassoure said.

Meanwhile, officials of the RATP, the Paris mass transit system, urged passengers to not leave parcels on buses and trains and to report any abandoned packages. Workers started sealing more than 8,000 trash cans in the Metro and regional rail network, or RER, where bombs could be planted, and about 3,000 transit officials handed out stickers and posted placards calling on Parisians to be “alert together.”

As they journeyed underground on the Metro’s 125-mile web of lines, some passengers admitted Wednesday to looking under seats for abandoned objects. But others said they weren’t any more worried than before Tuesday’s bombing.

“If something happened yesterday, it doesn’t mean something else will happen today,” Fanny Bourel, 29, a medical secretary, said as she waited for a train at Republique station in eastern Paris. “At any rate, you’ve got to keep living. You can’t stay shut up at home.”

Police sources said the bomb that blew up Tuesday on a train at Port Royal station appeared identical to those employed during attacks last year claimed by Algerian Islamic radicals that killed eight people and injured more than 160. Tuesday’s bomb was made from an empty cooking gas canister and gunpowder, and placed in a bag filled with nails that were meant to act as shrapnel, sources said.

The two people who were killed were identified as a 41-year-old man born in the French South Pacific island of New Caledonia and an unidentified Canadian woman. Twenty-six of the wounded were still hospitalized Wednesday, including three in critical condition.

Officials stressed that they had no solid evidence yet linking the unclaimed bombing to Algerian extremists. But Le Monde newspaper, quoting an internal document from the DST counterintelligence agency, reported that an Algerian Islamic activist living in Afghanistan was known to be planning an attack against “French interests.”