Hundreds of shoppers were lunching in the self-service cafeteria of a suburban department store near Paris late last week when a bomb had exploded at precisely 12:29 p.m., devastating a 800-sq.-ft. area. Flying glass and debris wounded 41 people, two of them seriously. The blast came only four days after another bomb had ripped through a crowded post office at Paris' city hall, killing one person and wounding 18 others. Amid a wave of minor and apparently unrelated bombings across Western Europe last week, Paris remained the center of a brutal game of terrorist blackmail.
Immediately after the cafeteria blast, about...