Overview of all attacks in France: This was the deadliest in the last 40 years

The attack on the headquarters of the weekly "Charlie Hebdo" committed on Wednesday in Paris is the deadliest terrorist attack in France in decades, writes the AFP agency and presents an overview of terrorist attacks with the highest number of victims in that country in the last 40 years, reports the Patria News Agency.

March 2012: On March 11 and 15, Mohamed Merah (23) killed three soldiers with shots fired on the street in the city of Toulouse and in Montauban, and then on March 19, he killed three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Merah was killed on March 22 by police who surrounded the apartment where he was hiding.

December 3, 1996: An explosive attack on the Port-Royal metro station in southern Paris killed 4 and injured 91 people. This terrorist act was similar in execution to a series of attacks carried out in 1995.

July 25, 1995: A bomb exploded on a suburban railway line (RER) at the "Saint-Michel" station in the very center of Paris. 8 people were killed and 119 injured. The attack, attributed to Algerian Islamist extremists, was the deadliest of nine terrorist actions in which a total of 8 people were killed and more than 200 injured in the summer of 1995. In 2002, two men were sentenced to life imprisonment for three of the series of attacks.
 

September 17, 1986: A bomb attack in front of the headquarters of the Tati department store on Rennes street in Paris. 7 people were killed and 55 injured. It is considered to be one of the 15 attacks (three of which were unsuccessful) carried out by a pro-Iranian terrorist network led by Fouad Ali Saleh in 1985 and 1986. A total of 13 people were killed and 303 injured in these attacks.

December 31, 1983: Two people were killed and 34 injured at the Saint-Charles train station in Marseille in a bomb explosion in automatic luggage lockers. A few minutes earlier, in a separate explosion, three people were killed and three injured on a high-speed train (TGV) traveling from Marseille to Paris. The "Organization for Armed Arab Struggle" claimed responsibility for these two attacks.

July 15, 1983: A bomb explosion near the check-in counters of Turkish Airlines at Paris Orly airport killed 8 and injured 54 people. In March 1985, three Armenians were convicted for this attack, sentenced to life imprisonment, 15 years, and 10 years in prison, respectively.

August 9, 1982: Five terrorists opened fire and threw grenades into the "Goldenberg" restaurant in the Jewish quarter of Paris. They killed 6 and injured 22 people. The attack, long attributed to the Palestinian Abu Nidal group, remains unsolved.
 

March 29, 1982: An attack on the "Capitole" train traveling from Toulouse to Paris was carried out on the day when the then mayor of Paris (later President of France) Jacques Chirac was supposed to be on the train. Five people were killed and 77 injured. It appears to have been retaliation by terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos, for the arrest of two members of his network, the Swiss Bruno Breguet and his future wife Magdalena Kopp.

October 3, 1980: A bomb hidden in a motorcycle exploded in front of a synagogue on Kopernik Street in Paris during prayer time, killing 4 people and injuring about twenty.

May 20, 1978: Palestinian militants opened fire at Paris Orly airport on a group of passengers boarding a flight to Tel Aviv. 8 people were killed, three of whom were attackers, and three passengers were injured.

In addition, on September 19, 1989, a UTA DC-10 aircraft on the Brazzaville-Paris route exploded over Niger. 170 people lost their lives, 54 of whom were French citizens. In 1999, French justice, in absentia, sentenced six members of the Libyan secret service to life imprisonment.