Explosives found in Paris

PARIS, France -- A bomb squad has found a car containing explosives in Paris, French police said.

Police sealed off the streets surrounding the car after a journalist from the newspaper Le Monde reported receiving a call from a man claiming to speak for the Corsican guerrilla group Armata Corsa.

Experts discovered all the components necessary to assemble a bomb in the car, parked in the city centre, but police said the device was not primed.

Armata Corsa warned in January that it would bomb Paris and Strasbourg unless police arrested the killers of a Corsican nationalist leader gunned down in Corsica last year.

Police stepped up security in response to the threat.

Le Monde quoted the anonymous caller as saying the explosives-laden vehicle "proves once again that we can strike when we want and where we want."

The caller said the fact that the explosives were not primed amounted to a form of "truce" by the group in response to "recent signs of good faith" by the French government, the paper reported.

The French have governed Corsica since the annexation of the island in the Treaty of Versailles in 1768.

Since 1982, Corsica has existed under a special administrative statute, granted by Paris, that has afforded its residents a measure of local autonomy along with its own assembly comprised of 61 members elected by universal suffrage.

But the arrangement, many Corsicans say, has devolved in recent years into little more than an excuse for a tightly knit clan of local politicians to broker clandestine deals with Paris.

The result, since the mid-1970s, has been sporadic outbreaks of violence by nationalist and separatist elements who resent what they see as the central government's heavy-handed approach to governance of their island territory.

Bomb attacks

Tensions boiled over in 1997 when Paris' envoy to the island, Claude Erignac, was shot dead in an attack attributed to separatists.

Corsican lawmakers in August 2000 overwhelmingly approved a proposal from French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to grant the island more autonomy in shaping its own laws.

Under the proposal, the Corsican assembly would be able to adopt certain laws passed in Paris within four years.

Armata Corsa was the only high-profile Corsican group not to support the truce.

The group has been linked to numerous small-scale bomb attacks since it was founded in June 1999.

Corsica's myriad separatist groups have planted hundreds of bombs in their two-decade campaign for greater autonomy.

They have largely confined their actions to night attacks on government buildings on the island and avoided casualties.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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French Government
Corsica Online

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