France shuts four ‘extremist’ mosques in Paris region

From the French edition of The Local

France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced on Wednesday that France had taken action to close down four mosques suspected of promoting a violent form of Islam.

The mosques were all in the Ile-de-France region around Paris – in the departments of Yvelines, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val de Marne.

In a statement the interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said authorities had “arranged the administrative closure of four mosques.”

The decision to shut them down was based on “Article 8 of the laws around the state of emergency which allows for closing places of worship in which words are spoken that provoke hatred or violence or incite people to commit acts of terrorism or justify such acts.”

The closures take effect immediately.

One of the mosques was the Al-Islah mosque in Villiers-sur-Marne where authorities discovered a hidden Islamic school in the summer. It was known to intelligence services because it was frequented by 12 individuals convicted of trying to travel to Syria to wage jihad.

One of the closures was an Islamic prayer room in the town of Ecquevilly in Yvelines that was “an influential place for the Salafist movement… that called for discrimination and hate and even violence.