FRANCE: The Algerian-born baggage handler arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport last month with guns and explosives in his car was framed by his in-laws in a family row, the Paris public prosecutor, Mr Yves Bot, said yesterday.
The retired soldier who told the police he had seen Mr Abderazak Besseghir handling a gun in one of the airport's car parks admitted in custody having taken part in a plot with Mr Besseghir's in-laws to set him up.
Mr Besseghir was released yesterday. The prosecutor's office sent an assistant public prosecutor to the prison where he was being held to explain the situation to him.
Mr Besseghir (27) was arrested on December 28th after police found an automatic pistol, a machine gun, five cakes of plastic explosive, two detonators and a slow-burning fuse hidden in the spare wheel in the boot of his car.
But he puzzled the investigators from the start. He had no police record and no known links to radical Islamists.
He said that he had never seen the weapons before and that he was being framed by the family of his late wife, who died in a fire at their home in Bondy, outside Paris, last summer. After her death Mr Besseghir was questioned by the police about the blaze, but was released without charge.
His wife's family subsequently claimed that just before her death she had threatened to leave him because he had become a Muslim fundamentalist.
The airport and anti-terrorist police spent two weeks trying to unravel a non-existent terrorist plot at the airport, which is one of Europe's busiest, handling 1,200 flights and 130,000 passengers a day.
In 2001 it was the point of departure for the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Paris to Miami flight in mid-air using explosives concealed in his trainers.- (Guardian Service)