France ‘still at war’, warns minister after arrests over failed bomb in Paris

FRENCH anti-terrorism investigators questioned five people yesterday over the discovery of a primed bomb at an apartment block in one of Paris’s plushest districts over the weekend, amid government warnings that France is “still at war”.

The arrests were made as four people were held in Marseille, southern France, in connection with an attack on Sunday in which a man stabbed two women to death in the port city. Police also raided buildings as they sought to piece together where he had stayed before the attack.

With the terror threat at maximum levels, the French parliament overwhelmingly passed an anti-terrorism bill yesterday that boosts police powers to search and restrict people’s movements but which rights groups warn restricts civil liberties. The five arrested over the Paris bomb, men in their 30s, are known to authorities and one is on an intelligence services’ list of “radicalised” people, which includes the names of potential Islamist militants.

“We are still in a state of war,” Gérard Collomb, the interior minister, told France Inter radio, adding that 12 terrorism plots had already been foiled this year. Judicial sources said the explosive device included two gas canisters inside the building in the 16th arrondissement of western Paris and two outside, some of them doused with petrol and wired to connect to a mobile phone. It appears there were several unsuccessful attempts to detonate the canisters.

A resident alerted police at 4.30am on Saturday after being woken by noise in the stairwell.

Speaking to Le Parisien, the unnamed resident, a man in his 40s, said: “There must have been at least 30 litres of petrol. I turned off the gas canisters and took them outside.” The arrests, mainly in the Essonne area, south of Paris, were made after police matched fingerprints on a canister to one of the men.

Mr Collomb said it was unclear why the home-made bomb had been planted there. However, Le Figaro cited sources as believing the suspects had hoped to target a “militant association against radical Islamism” but got the wrong address due to a homonym.