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 Gay Paris Mayor Targeted By Terrorists
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Posted: January 10, 2008 - 5:00 pm ET
(Paris) French police have beefed up protection
for Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe after an Islamist website used by Al-Qaeda
members listed him as a target.
The threat was relayed to the French government
by the United States after it was discovered by the CIA which monitors Al-Qaeda
messages on the Internet.
The message, according to radio network RTL said
that terrorists had pinpointed Delanoe and the city of Paris in an effort to
bring the downfall of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"The threats are not specific and do not
come from a site linked directly to Al-Qaeda," a Paris police official told
RTL.
"We are adapting to the situation, without
losing our nerve, without overly worrying," Delanoe told the network.
Delanoe is a Socialist and Sarkozy a conservative
who has aligned himself with the war in Iraq. It is believed that Delanoe was
chosen as a target because security around the president is already more intense
and more difficult to penetrate.
Delanoe is widely popular as Paris's mayor but
has come under criticism from the city's sizable Moslem community because he is
openly gay.
Nevertheless, he is expected to have little
difficulty in winning another term at the helm of France's biggest city when
Parisians go to the polls in March is frequently mentioned as a potential
candidate for the French presidency in the 2012 national election.
In 1998, while he was a relatively obscure city
councilor, Delanoe came out in a television interview, breaking and unwritten
French law that a politician's private life should remain private.
He later said that friends urged him not to go
public, but that he overruled them because of the good he felt it would do to
advance gay rights. "Would not my intervention help even if only in a small
way to lighten the burden of secrecy borne by so many people," he wrote in
his 2004 biography.
In 2001 Delanoe was elected the capital's first
ever Socialist mayor and the first gay person to head a city government in a
major city.
A year later Delanoe was stabbed by a deranged
homophobe as he presided over an all-night cultural party at city hall.
He was rushed to hospital suffering a single stab
wound to his abdomen. Doctors at Pitie-Salpetriere hospital operated on
Delanoe for more than three hours. He would spend nearly a month in
hospital.
Police arrested a man at the scene. During
interrogations he told investigators he hated gays and politicians.
©365Gay.com 2008
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