A man abandoned a hand grenade close to a synagogue near Paris. Police patrolling the area near the synagogue in Rosny-sous-Bois, a town located east of the French capital, on Monday night noticed a suspicious man in the area holding a bag. The man ran off but left the bag, which contained a grenade. The grenade did not explode. The man had been standing outside a house belonging to the synagogue’s former rabbi, which itself backs on to the current rabbi’s house and, behind that, the synagogue, a police spokesman told the news agency JTA. However, there was no evidence that Jewish property was targeted, the spokesman added. Sammy Ghozlan, president of the Seine Saint-Denis Jewish Community Council, told JTA that the police “had succeeded in preventing an obviously anti-Semitic incident.”
