A police official was hurt but his injuries were not life-threatening, the source said.
Advertisement
French police investigating the abandonment of a auto packed with gas cylinders near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral have arrested several suspects and also established that the vehicle contained 3 jerry cans of diesel fuel, judicial and police sources said. One cylinder was empty, and the other six were reportedly full.
The Peugeot was found in the early hours of Sunday morning on a Seine riverside road metres from Notre Dame cathedral. The auto also had its hazard lights flashing and had no registration. but no detonator, and one theory is that it was being used as a dry run for a terror attack in the city, which has been targeted several times in recent years. The car’s owner was taken into custody earlier this week but later released.
One of the women arrested in Wednesday’s operation was thought to be the vehicle owner’s daughter; the auto owner was also reportedly on an intelligence-watch list.
“These three women aged 39, 23 and 19 had been radicalised, were fanatics and were in all likelihood preparing an imminent, violent act”, Cazeneuve said in a televised statement.
France remains on maximum alert after calls for attacks on the country.
Police officers stand guard as they take part in a raid in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, south-east of Paris, on Thursday.
Sunday’s discovery of the Peugeot 607 laden with seven gas cylinders triggered a terrorism investigation and revived fears about further attacks in a country where Islamist militants have killed more than 230 people since January 2015. As well as gas canisters, documents written in Arabic were found in the vehicle.
A state of emergency has been in place in France since then.
France has been on high alert for terror since ISIS carried out an attack in Paris last November that killed 130 people.
According to the Guardian, Florence Berthout, the mayor of Paris’s fifth arrondissement, said earlier this week that the Notre Dame vehicle incident highlighted the need to increase security in the French capital.
Advertisement
The first couple arrested, a 34-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, have been held since Tuesday and are known to the security services for links to terrorists. This year alone, 260 arrests have been made in France in relation to terrorist activities, Cazeneuve said.
