France creating 1,500 prison places to isolate jihadist inmates

FRANCE will create 1,500 prison places for Islamist extremists in order to isolate and prevent them from converting other prisoners as part of a plan to stop young people becoming terrorists.

“This Islamist radicalisation threatens our society,” Édouard Philippe, the French prime minister, said yesterday as he unveiled the plan.

It includes measures for dealing with the hundreds of French men, women and their children who have returned from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq or are expected to do so.

Schoolteachers will get training on how to spot signs of radicalisation, and local authorities will be told to improve their scrutiny of the growing number of private Islamic schools.

Mr Philippe travelled to the northern city of Lille to present the programme which includes 60 measures and puts the emphasis on prevention.

It is the third programme in fewer than four years to try to prevent and control the phenomenon – which many other European states are also grappling with – of disaffected young people turning to radical Islam and sometimes to terror.

It aims to draw lessons from past failures, after a three-year wave of terror attacks claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant across France that killed more than 240 people and injured hundreds more.

“This is a plan of mobilisation,” said the prime minister. “It’s a battle the state alone cannot fight.”

A total of 512 people are currently in prison for terrorism offences in France and a further 1,139 prisoners have been flagged as being radicalised. Mr Philippe said he would create 1,500 places in separate prison wings for radicalised inmates, with 450 of them to be ready by the end of this year.