France bomb lab blows plot
The French police investigating a suspected bomb factory near Paris believe three arrested men were preparing attacks and had made calls to Syria, a minister said on Thursday.
Ingredients to make an explosive known as TATP, commonly used by the Islamic State group (IS), were discovered in an unoccupied apartment in the Parisian suburb of Villejuif on Wednesday, as well as gas canisters and electrical wiring.
More potential TATP ingredients were found on Thursday during a search of an enclosed parking space belonging to the main suspect, the flat’s owner, a source close to the case said.
Anti-terror police launched raids following a tip-off from a worker at the building who has been praised for his “citizen’s reflex” for reporting suspicious activity. The Paris daily Le Parisien reported that the workman was a plumber working to fix a recurrent leak.
He was outside the building when he spotted chemicals on a balcony of the flat, then saw a soldering iron and a hot plate through the window, the paper reported, quoting a source close to the probe.
Interior minister Gerard Collomb said the men in custody — two were arrested on Wednesday and a third overnight — “were involved in terrorism”. “We’ve seen that there were calls exchanged” with someone in the war zone in Syria, Mr Collomb said on Franceinfo radio. The men have denied they were preparing attacks, claiming they were planning a string of robberies in which the explosives would be used to blow up bank cash machines, Mr Collomb said.
The arrests raised questions about whether the suspects might be linked to a jihadist cell in Spain which carried out two vehicle attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils last month. Some of the extremists behind the violence in Spain — mostly Moroccan nationals who were also preparing bombs made with TATP — visited Paris on August 11 and 12, about a week before their deadly rampage. “It is possible there were links but honestly I don’t know,” Mr Collomb said. The Spain attackers stayed in a hotel in the Parisian suburb of Malakoff a short drive from where the suspected bomb factory was discovered on Wednesday in Villejuif. After buying a camera and leaving their hotel, Mr Collomb said the Spain jihadists “spent a long time in front of the Eiffel Tower... We have it all from their phone data”.
France has been under a state of emergency since IS gunmen launched a series of simultaneous raids on bars, the national stadium and the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in November 2015, leaving 130 people dead.
Since those atrocities and a truck attack in Nice in July 2016 that killed 86 people, France has suffered a string of smaller assaults mainly targeting security forces.
The deadliest single attack in Europe remains the 2004 Madrid train bombings claimed by Al Qaeda that killed 192. Similar attacks on London’s mass transit system the year before took another 56 linves, including those of the four suicide bombers. But that momentum, crucially, was not maintained despite multiple other attempts to blow up airliners and conduct other attacks.
The death toll in Europe remains a fraction of that in countries like Iraq, Pakistan, Syria or Afghanistan. Still, given the savagery and death toll of recent attacks, it is fair to say France is now on the receiving end of the most sustained militant assault any Western state has yet faced.(The death toll from mass shootings in the US remains a substantially higher, but they are not seen as coordinated in the same way.)
In Europe, there are parallels with the campaigns waged by Northern Irish Republican or Spanish Basque separatists in the last three decades of the twentieth century.