September 15, 1974, attack at the Saint-Germain Drugstore

Paris was struck to the heart on September 15, 1974. The Drugstore Publicis located on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, since replaced by the Emporio Armani Caffè, was the victim of a deadly attack that day. Two men were killed by a grenade explosion, thirty-four people were injured, including four children.

In the headlines of Figaro However, the case is overshadowed by another headline: a hostage-taking at the French embassy in The Hague carried out by the Japanese Red Army. “Terrorism and hostage-taking are a phenomenon of our times”underlines the journalist Max Clos while two days earlier an ETA bomb ravaged the Rolando café in Madrid.

A grenade in the crowd

At the Drugstore Saint-Germain, the second establishment of this type opened by Publicis on an idea of ​​its founder, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, the crowd was large on this Sunday. Like typical American stores, the Parisian drugstore opened in 1965 after the one on the Champs-Élysées, offers several catering services, pharmacy, newsstand, tobacco. It is open almost at all hours.

At 5:15 p.m., a man threw a packet from the first floor towards the tobacco shop. “A few seconds later the interior windows shattered.”reports The Figaro. Albert, a boy from the nearby Lipp brewery, testifies: “I had just bought cigarettes at the drugstore’s tobacconist’s and as I was climbing the few steps leading to Boulevard Saint-Germain, I was thrown to the ground by the force of an explosion. There were screams. A little boy was injured in the hand and thigh. Further on, a young girl was covered in blood.”

The singer Jean-Jacques Debout also witnessed the drama: “While I was buying newspapers, I heard an explosion. A child covered in blood rushed outside and fell on the sidewalk. I followed him to help him. That’s when I saw a police van, stopped on the boulevard. I ran towards it shouting: “Come quickly, there’s an explosion at the drugstore.”

Two men were killed, David Grunberg, 34, and François Benzo, 27. The injured, some very seriously, are numerous. Around thirty, spread across the various Parisian hospitals.

A plane for terrorists

The spoon of an American-made grenade was quickly found in the debris. The perpetrator of the attack was described by witnesses as a young man, aged 25 to 30, of European type, who had long hair and wore a grey jacket.

The connection is quickly made with the other terrorist affair that has been in the news for two days. On September 13, a commando of three Japanese took nine people hostage at the French embassy in The Hague. The French ambassador, Count Jacques Sénard, is among them. The terrorists say they belong to the Japanese Red Army, a revolutionary group close to a branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The group is demanding the release of one of their members, Yukata Fuyura, arrested in Orly on July 27 and held since then in the Santé prison. They are also demanding a plane and a million dollars.

Negotiations stalled, but after the Drugstore attack, an unknown person presenting himself as the spokesman for the Japanese Red Army telephoned two press organizations, AFP and Reuters. Speaking French “with a strong accent that had nothing Japanese about it”reports The Figarohe claims that the attack was carried out to encourage the French and Dutch authorities to resolve the Hague hostage affair more quickly. “If the government does not do what it should do, we will attack a cinema”he threatens.

Although investigators told the press that they doubted the link between the two cases, the hostage crisis was quickly resolved. Fuyura, whose real name was Yoshiaki Yamada, was transferred to Schiphol-Amsterdam airport. After 100 hours of negotiations and the release of the hostages, the prisoner flew with the commando to South Yemen and then to Syria.

The following year, Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Carlos, was identified as the possible perpetrator of the attack after the shooting on rue Toullier in Paris on June 27, 1975. He himself claimed responsibility in 1979 in an interview published in the magazine The Arabic language. But for the victims, the time for justice has not yet come. After a dismissal in 1983, the SOS Attentats association obtained the reopening of the case. Carlos, arrested in 1994 in Sudan, is tried for the triple murder of 1975 and for four bomb attacks committed in France in 1982 and 1983 but it is not until 2017 that he finally answers for the Drugstore attack. The “professional revolutionary” The self-proclaimed man was then sentenced once again to life imprisonment, a sentence confirmed in 2021.