Teenage suspect held as France warns of attacks
PARIS: A 15-year-old boy was arrested in Paris on suspicion of preparing imminent “violent action”, two judicial sources said, the second alleged plot with links to Islamic State discovered in France this week.
Last Sunday, a car loaded with gas cylinders was found near Notre Dame cathedral, leading to the discovery of a plot to attack a Paris railway station under the direction of IS. Seven people, including four women, were arrested.
The arrests were made as Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned that the country faced a threat from 15,000 homegrown radicals.
The teenager had been under house arrest since April for suspected links to Islamic extremists.
The police suspect him of plotting “in response to calls from Syria to attack France,” one of the sources said.
Investigators are looking into calls made by a French member of the IS group, Rachid Kassim, for supporters of the group to strike French targets.
The source said the 15-yearold had been in touch with Kassim using the encrypted messaging app Telegram.
Kassim has regularly appeared in IS propaganda videos calling for attacks on French targets.
He has been linked to at least one of the two teen jihadists who executed an elderly priest in a Normandy church in July.
Appearing on French television on Sunday, Prime Minister Valls said around 15,000 people were known to police in France as having been radicalised, up from a previous estimate of 10,000.
He said around 700 jihadists from France were fighting in Syria and Iraq.
President Francois Hollande said America’s response to the 9/11 attacks augmented rather than defeated the jihadist threat, with the consequences of the Iraq war now being felt in terrorscarred France.
“The response that the American administration gave to these attacks... far from eradicating the threat, expanded it over a wider area. Namely to Iraq,” he wrote on Facebook.