Paris: French police have arrested three women who were plotting imminent terrorist attacks, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
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A Peugeot 607 was found with its lights flashing in a no-parking zone in Paris’s Rue du Petit-Point, across the River Seine from Notre Dame, at 7.30am on Sunday.
Later that day, its owner went to the police to report that his is radicalized daughter was missing but without saying his vehicle had also disappeared, the prosecutor’s office said.
No one was inside, but police found five canisters filled with gas in the trunk and an empty canister on one of the seats.
The arrests took place in Boussy Saint Antoine, some 30 km (20 miles) south-east of Paris, connected to the gas cylinder probe.
Police investigators and bomb disposal experts were on the ground.
The car’s owner went to police to report that his 19-year-old radicalized daughter was missing.
On Tuesday, a couple, aged 34 and 29, were arrested on a motorway in southern France.
Officers said there were no detonator devices found in the auto, but the contents of the cylinders suggested there could have been a plan to explode the vehicle. His daughter still is being sought.
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.
ISIS has threatened Notre Dame as part of its violent campaign against France for sending war planes to bomb terror bases in countries including Syria and Iraq.
France is on high alert following a string of jihadist attacks, including last November’s coordinated bloodshed in which Islamic State extremists killed 130 people.
The criticism comes after authorities faced heavy fire for alleged security lapses in July, when 86 people were killed by an Algerian ploughing a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the resort of Nice.
According to Cazeneuve, there have been 260 arrests so far this year in cases linked to extremism.
Several gas cylinders and documents in Arabic were found in an unmarked auto next the famous Parisian cathedral on Sunday.
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The French Interior Minister claimed a female whom French police shot and arrested was likely planning an attack near Paris, France, on September 8, 2016.
