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French courts

get tough on

bomb hoaxes

PARIS: Several hoaxers have been jailed in France over the past few days as courts get tough on a flood of false bomb threats after two bombings in Paris in a month.

Justice sources said on Tuesday there were 15 hoaxes in Paris alone on Monday.

A man who told a railway official that a bomb would explode in a high-speed TGV train at the capital's Montparnasse station on Monday was sentenced within hours to six months in jail, four of them suspended.

A man who planted a fake bomb ouside the tax collector's office in Rouen on Sunday was jailed for two months.

In Lyon on Monday, a court sentenced a 23-year-old hoaxer to 200 hours of community service for forcing the evacuation of a major shopping centre. He told police he wanted to have fun.

Another hoaxer, a man who uses a wheelchair, was fined 25,000 francs ($5,000) and given a one-year suspended jail sentence in Montpellier at the weekend.

Police have been getting a steady flow of false bomb alerts since a bomb on a Metro train killed seven people and wounded 86 on July 25. A second bomb near the Arc de Triomphe injured 17 people last week. Investigators suspect that Algerian extremists were behind the blasts.

In an effort to intimidate hoaxers, police have showed on television switchboards which display the telephone number and address of a caller, llowing patrols to quickly catch hoaxers.-Reuter