The Letter

Regarding the letter below, Mosvar Barayev is apprently this guy. However, the authors misspelled his first name, which is supposed to be Movsar. He was the leader of the Chechen group that took a Moscow theater audience hostage in 2002.

The letter was also received by Le Monde and Le Parisien. Authorities are now stating that the letter doesn't fit normal patterns and the police are openly skeptical, saying they've never heard of the group (feh!) and that Islamist terrorists don't usually announce the steps they intend to take. Le Monde's Piotr Smolar also says that the reference to Charles Martel is more reminiscent of far-right ideology.

Whatever the doubts of the police, the public is very much on the qui vive, as can be seen from the behavior of the delirious motorist Jonathan blogged below. To-night, the 8 o'clock nightly news on France 2 showed the Paris bomb squad blowing shit up all over town and dynamiting the tailgates of abandoned trucks. The Prime Minister's office is stepping up it's a security plan known as vigipirate (the name of which is a combination of vigilance and pirate, or "high-jacker" or "terrorist." Not obvious what an English equivalent would be... "operation vigirist"? There's a reason this sort of thing is rarely immitated.)

UPDATE: The Beeb reports that "a suspicious object on a railway line north of Paris hit rail services, including the Eurostar, but it turned out to be an oxygen canister. ¶ The bomb disposal experts who examined the object marked 'AZF, do not touch' dismissed the threat as a bad joke."

FURTHER UPDATE: [deleted: it was boring]