Sarkozy: immigration ‘complicates things’

Following a series of terror attacks in Paris last week, former president Nicolas Sarkozy said that immigration, “if it is not linked to terrorism... complicates things.”

“The question of immigration will be the subject of an extremely deep debate because we cannot continue like this,” he was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying.

“Immigration, which we have such problems coping with, creates the problem of integration, which creates communitarianism," where people identify with their own community.

Separately, following the attacks, which left 17 people killed, Muslim places of worship in two French towns were fired upon, prosecutors said on Jan. 8.

Three blank grenades were thrown at a mosque shortly after midnight in the city of Le Mans, west of Paris. A bullet hole was also found in a window of the mosque.

In the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France, several shots were fired in the direction of a Muslim prayer hall shortly after evening prayers. The hall was empty, the local prosecutor said.

An explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in the eastern French town of Villefranche-sur-Saone also left no casualties. Local prosecutors have described it as a “criminal act.”

[With AFP]