3 probed in failed Paris terror attack

THREE MEN ARE FACING terror-linked charges in the failed attack a week ago on a residential building in an upscale Paris neighborhood with gas canisters that failed to ignite, a judicial official said Saturday.

The suspects were placed under formal investigation late Friday in the mysterious attack in the building in western Paris’ chic 16th arrondissement, the official said. No motive for the attack has been uncovered and the three have refused to answer questions.

The trio has denied a role in the attack plot in which four gas canisters on the building’s ground floor, doused with gasoline, were set to explode once a call was made to a mobile phone that served as a detonator, anti-terrorism prosecutor Francois Molins said at a Friday news conference. QUETTA, Pakistan — The death toll from a suicide bombing at a Shiite shrine in Pakistan’s southwest increased to 24 after four victims died at a hospital overnight, police said Saturday.

A suicide bomber struck the shrine packed with worshipers in a remote village in Jhal Magsi district, about 240 miles east of Quetta in Baluchistan Province on Thursday.

Senior police officer Mohammad Iqbal said that more than 20 victims were still receiving treatment, some with critical wounds.

The bomber detonated his explosives vest when he was stopped for a routine search by a police officer guarding the shrine. Five children, a woman and two police officers were among those killed.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. LIBYAN authorities have recovered the bodies of 21 Coptic Christian workers, mostly Egyptians, who in 2015 were beheaded on a beach in the coastal city of Sirte by ISIS militants, according to a statement issued Saturday by a government-linked anti-ISIS group.

The group, al-Bonyan al-Marsous, quoted an ISIS terrorist who witnessed the attack as saying all but one of the 21 showed no resistance to their impending decapitation. The terrorist, arrested last year, said filming the beheadings was disrupted when one of the Christians resisted. He was beaten into submission.

A grisly video of the beheadings was posted online in February 2015, shocking Egyptians and prompting the Cairo government to stage punitive air strikes against militant targets in Libya. It showed the hostages in orange jumpsuits being led along a beach, each accompanied by a masked terrorist.