As I read the awful news on Saturday morning of the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, France, on Friday, the thought that immediately flashed in my mind was: “We must never take our security for granted”.
Although we hope and pray such a calamity will not happen in our shores in the immediate or distant future, we have to acknowledge that the risk is always there.
In this borderless world, terrorism has gone global. According to AFP reports, some 82 people died in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on Friday night.
Four terrorists (described as “suspected jihadists”) were killed when police stormed the venue.
In the incident, the terrorists had earlier on taken hostages. This concert hall, in central Paris, is only a short distance (200m) from the former office of Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked by terrorists in January.
The same reports said that another deadly incident took place near Stade de France stadium in the north of Paris, where three people were killed.
An international football match was going on when the attack took place. An AFP journalist who covered the sports event said that two explosions were heard. French President Francois Hollande, who was also present at the stadium, was evacuated by security forces before the football match ended.
A third incident took place at a Cambodian restaurant called Le Petit Cambodge, not too far away from the Bataclan concert venue in northeast Paris. In this incident, 11 people died.
Fearing more attacks in the city centre, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo advised city residents to stay at home. The French government has been on guard since the deadly attack in January against the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket that took 17 lives. Since then, several other terrorist attacks had been successfully foiled through the year.
Sadly, not this time.
The United Kingdom Daily Mail online portal (on Saturday) reported that as many as 142 people had been killed and several wounded in the Paris “terror attacks”.
According to witnesses, the terrorists shouted: “Allahu Akbar… This is for Syria”, as they burst into the concert hall and opened fire.
French police stormed the place at around midnight and killed one of the terrorists while the others blew themselves up. Four policemen died in that operation.
Describing the horrific incident at the Bataclan concert theatre, Paris resident Marc Coupris said: “It looked like a battlefield, there was blood everywhere, there were bodies everywhere. I was at the far side of the hall when the shooting began. There seemed to be at least two gunmen. They shot from the balcony.”
According to journalist Julien Pearce, the gunmen (young men in their 20s) were wearing flak jackets and holding Kalashnikovs in their hands. They reloaded three to four times as they gunned down innocent people at random.
“They were not wearing masks. They just started spraying.”
On Saturday morning, as I wrote this commentary, CNN news portal updated the number of casualties (presently totalling 153 deaths and countless others injured) as follows:
112 were killed at the Bataclan concert hall;
14 were killed in Rue Bichat at the site of the Le Petit Cambodge restaurant in the 10th district;
19 died in Rue de Charonne in the 11th district outside a bar called La Belle Equipe;
FOUR were killed in Avenue de la Republique in the 10th district; and,
FOUR others died outside the stadium (Stade de France, in Saint-Denis, north of Paris).
Without a doubt, the deadly attacks in Paris last Friday are a crime against humanity.
According to Article 7(1) of the Statute of Rome (which established the International Court of Justice), a “crime against humanity” means — “any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: (a) Murder…”
Paragraph (2) of the same article then defines “attack directed against any civilian population” to mean “a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a state or organisational policy to commit such attack”.
The perpetrators of last Friday’s vicious attack, if arrested, can be tried in France (under French national law) or brought to trial (preferably with their leaders and commanders) to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague (under international criminal law). France signed the Statute of Rome on July 18, 1998, and ratified it on June 9, 2000.
For Malaysians, the lesson derived from this recent tragic incident in Paris is very clear. Never take our security for granted. Perhaps now many will begin to understand why Parliament passed its Prevention of Terrorism Act 2015 (Pota) on April 7.
The writer formerly served the Attorney-General’s Chambers before he left for practice, the corporate sector, and then, the academia