PARIS (AFP-EJP)---French President Francois Hollande vowed to beef up security as police Sunday pressed on with sweeping anti-terror raids that saw one man killed and 11 arrested over an attack on a Jewish store.
"Security will be reinforced in the coming days," Hollande said after meeting Jewish leaders at the Elysee palace, vowing that the state was ready "to fight all terror threats".
"The state is totally mobilised to fight all terror threats," Hollande said, vowing that "planned anti-terror laws will be put before parliament as soon as possible.
This would help "further strengthen measures to fight this scourge more efficiently," he said.
Hollande said Saturday's raids had helped "crush an Islamist cell which wethink had struck in the past and which could stage attacks in the coming weeks."
He gave no details about the cell, but officials evoked the growing threat of homegrown radical Islamists, many of whom were recent converts.
On Saturday, just hours after the anti-terror raids, shots were fired at a synagogue in Argenteuil, a Paris suburb, during the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Synagogue services were thereafter cancelled.
Joel Mergui, head of the Jewish Consistory, who was among the leaders receveived by Hollande, spoke of a "war without mercy".
"We have assurances that additional security measures will be taken," said Mergui on the steps of the presidential Elysee Palace, alongside with four other leaders of the Jewish community, including Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, the umbrella representative body of French Jewish institutions.
Prasquier drew a parallel between Nazism and radical Islam. "Being complacent vis-à-vis radical Islam is being complacent vis-à-vis the Nazis," he said.
Citing a "monstrous ideology," Prasquier lambasted the "indulgence, complacency towards fanatical Islamic radicalism." According to him, “the entire national community must defend itself against values that are not those of the Republic."
President Hollande said that France, which has Western Europe's largest Muslim population," should not "stigmatise" the estimated four million adherents.
"The Muslims of France are not all Islamist fanatics," he said. "They are also victims."
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault also pledged to leave "nothing to chance" in the fight against terror as leading Jewish and anti-racism groups voiced concern over mounting intolerance in the country.
"The police are continuing investigations, to leave nothing in the dark and
to take no risks," Ayrault said in an interview on RTL radio.
Jeremy-Louis Sidney, a 33-year-old convert to Islam, was shot dead by police Saturday during a raid over a September 19 attack on the kosher grocery store Naouri Market in the gritty northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles which left one person injured.
Eleven other people were arrested across the country on Saturday.
"Some might think that what happened in a grocery in Sarcelles is not that serious," Ayrault said, underscoring the need to let "nothing be overlooked".
Police on Sunday raided an apartment in the French Riviera city of Cannes and searched a vehicle following the arrests of two men there who had at one time given refuge to Sidney, a source close to the investigation said.
Sidney had been at the home of "one of his two religious wives", a woman of 22 who has a girl of six and a one-month-old baby, during the early morning shootout in the eastern city of Strasbourg.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins described Sidney as "a delinquent who had onverted to radical Islam" and said his fingerprints were found on the remains of an explosive device lobbed at the kosher grocery.
He said the sweep had uncovered a list of Jewish associations, adding that "the inquiry will determine what were the next targets of this cell".
Interior Minister Manuel Valls meanwhile warned of a surge in homegrown Islamist radicals.
"There is a terrorist threat in France", Valls said in a radio interview. "It does not appear to come from foreigners, it appears to be French converts."
The 11 arrested suspects were born in the 1980s and 1990s, the Paris prosecutor said, adding that some were "common criminals who set out on a path of radicalisation toward Islamist jihadism".
Three of the suspects had criminal records for cases involving drug trafficking, theft and violence. Sidney himself had been sentenced to two years in prison in 2008 for drug trafficking.
Jewish groups on Sunday complained of increasing hate attacks.
"The facts speak for themselves. Anti-Semitic acts are increasing rapidly," Alain Jakubowitz, the head of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism told the Journal du Dimanche
"The worst enemies of Muslims are not the 'Islamophobes' but the radical Islamists," he said. "They have to understand that they will be the first victims" as a result of this growing trend.
Richard Prasquier said :"The intrinsic hatred against Jews is being more and more trivialised. »
"There will be no progress if barriers are not put on the national and
international levels," he added.
The French Council of the Muslim Faith on Sunday expressed its "support to and solidarity with the Jewish community in the wake of the attacks targeting its members and institutions."
Recalling the slayings by Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah -- who shot dead a rabbi, three Jewish pupils and three paratroopers in March -- the head of the organisation, Mohammed Moussaoui, said this case was sadly "far from being isolated or exceptional."