European press review

A French daily considers who could be behind the anthrax attacks in the United States.

And, nearer to home, France owns up to a day, 40 years ago, of what one paper describes as "indescribable barbarity" by the Paris police.

Hungary decides that you cannot be at war with someone and also have a friendship treaty with them.

And Europe's press ponders the killing of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavan Zeevi, generally seen as a major blow to a peace process that was beginning to show signs of life.

The fire next time?

"There is no reason at this stage for saying that Bin Laden's networks are behind the rising number of anthrax attacks in the USA," writes the French Liberation, "but nor is there any reason for saying that they are not."

The production techniques, the paper adds, "were mastered by countries such as Iraq, but also by a (former) Soviet Union many of whose scientists sold their talents - or their poisons - to the highest bidder".

"Without wishing to engage in doom-mongering," it adds - in the obvious opening gambit for doing precisely that - "we cannot rule out the possibility of tactical nuclear weapons also having ended up, via the same channels, in the hands of a terrorist organization that has already promised new tragedies and has proved that it keeps its promises."

A closure of sorts

The mayor of Paris on Wednesday unveiled a memorial to the unknown scores of Algerians killed in the city on 17 October 1961 in what the leading French daily Le Monde calls "an act of bloody police repression" against "peaceful demonstrators".

"Forty years after the events," the paper says, "the time has come to bring a long period of denial to an end so that this tragedy may find its place... in France's national conscience."

"It is not a question of denying the complexity of the times", it adds in a reference to the Algerian war of independence then raging, "nor the fact that the violence followed a series of attacks on police officers.

"It is a question of remembering that, on that day, the security forces acted on behalf of the state with indescribable barbarity."

Wednesday's act of remembrance, the paper points out, "coming at a time when the image of the Muslim world is being associated with terrorism, may go some way towards dispelling some of the fears affecting French society".

Et tu, ETA...

"The circle is tightening around ETA," says Madrid's ABC of the arrest in Spain on Wednesday of seven suspected members of the armed Basque separatist group, believed by the authorities to be the lynchpins of ETA's flagship Donosti commando.

The circle is tightening "qualitatively and quantitatively", the paper stresses, "and this opens up the prospect of the terrorist group's defeat becoming a growing probability."

The progress achieved, it adds, added to the accords on terrorism agreed among the European Union members, means that "ETA finds itself under increased pressure", and even the nationalists see it as "a threat to their short and medium-term strategy".

Absent (-minded) friends

The Budapest daily Magyar Hirlap agrees with the Hungarian foreign minister's contention that the Afghan-Hungarian friendship treaty abrogated by Hungary on Wednesday had no significance whatsoever.

"This friendship treaty, as is the case with similar ones, would have gone unnoticed... if war had not broken out," the paper says. But it sees the point of doing away with it.

"It is not a good idea to have a friendship treaty with a country we are at war with," it points out. "It goes against one's sense of law and sense of justice."

The killing of hope

Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung expects Wednesday's killing of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi to have a devastating psychological effect on Israel and cause growing demands for a "war on terrorism" of the kind being waged against Afghanistan.

But there is a difference.

"The United States can count on almost worldwide support for its fight against terrorism," the paper says. "But Israel, with the kind of campaign it is conducting, is on the road to isolation."

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, it adds, will win no Western backing for his fight against terrorism, unless "he curbs his own predilection for military action and seeks to revive the peace process, regardless of Palestinian provocation".

The Spanish El Pais focuses on the fact that the killing, as the paper puts it, "broke a taboo, for no Israeli Government minister had ever been assassinated by a Palestinian".

"In the current world situation," the paper says, "it is more necessary than ever to defuse the crisis between Israelis and Palestinians."

The problem is that this also "seems more impossible than ever".

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung agrees that the "the recent attempts to pull together the threads of dialogue" are as good as dead.

"There will be no more talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians until Mr Arafat has apprehended the killers and put them on trial," the paper notes. "But it is hardly conceivable that the Palestinian leader will be able to do so without jeopardizing his own position."

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres "is now faced with the collapse of all his efforts, as are the diplomats who have tried to broker some sort of agreement", it points out.

"This makes it hard to believe that the struggle against Mr Bin Laden and Afghanistan's ruling Taleban militia will bear political fruit in Palestine," the paper concludes.

Still safe to smile

The tragedy, anxiety and sheer human misery underlying the international crisis confronts newspaper cartoonists with the challenge of raising a smile on their readers' faces.

The Italian L'Unita makes a worthy attempt. On its front page it shows a brief exchange between a man and a heavily veiled figure of indefinite gender: "Are you a Taleban woman?" the man asks. "No, I'm a postal worker," comes the muffled reply.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.