A ministerial meeting on national security was held on Monday morning at the Elysee Palace in Paris to "review preventive and protective measures" according to the President's office.

On leaving the meeting, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said 10,000 troops would be deployed starting Tuesday throughout France to protect what he called "sensitive" sites "because of the scale of threats which exist." The operation was part of the ongoing Vigipirate security plan which was continuing at the highest alert level he added.

Jewish schools protected

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve visited a Jewish school south of Paris on Monday morning and said that 4,700 security officers would be mobilised to protect the country's 717 Jewish schools. He added that soldiers would be posted as reinforcements.

The announcement came a day after an estimated 3.7 million people across France joined rallies to oppose the violent killings in Paris last week. The rally in Paris was the largest ever seen in the city.

Cazeneuve addressed the parents of the Yaguel Yaacov school in Montrouge in the south of Paris, near where a gunman shot dead a policewoman on Thursday. She was one of 17 people killed in last week's killings, including staff and journalists at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine. Four people were killed at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday.

PM Valls

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Monday that the gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman in southern Paris then four Jewish shoppers in a hostage drama on Friday, probably received help from someone else. Valls said on French television that "the hunt will go on," saying it was urgent because "the threat is still present."

Valls told BFM television that France was at war against "terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam."

An alleged accomplice of Coulibaly, Hayat Boumeddiene, was reported to have arrived in Istanbul, from Madrid on January 2 and then crossed into Syria from Turkey last Thursday, according to Turkey's foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

jm/bw (Reuters, AP, AFP)