The two older women were today being questioned in a high security police station in Paris, while Ines M.is expected to be interviewed when her health improves.
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“In the last few days and hours, a terrorist cell was dismantled, composed of young women totally receptive to the deadly Daesh ideology”, said Molins, using an Arabic acronym for the extremist group.
On Sunday, a Peugeot 607 containing seven gas cylinders, including an empty one on the front passenger seat, and three cans of diesel fuel was found near the famous tourist place Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
A 15-year-old girl, who is the daughter of one of the three women arrested, Amel S, was separately detained on Friday morning in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris.
An abandoned vehicle found Sunday with its license plates removed, its hazard lights mysteriously flashing and loaded with gas canisters set a frantic search in motion.
One fiance, Larossi Abballa, killed two police officials in Magnanville in June and filmed the aftermath on Facebook Live before dying in a police raid, he said.
A cell of young women including one who became engaged to two killed terrorists has been directed by Isis commanders in Syria to attempt another attack in France.
After police shot Abballa, she then was supposed to marry Adel Kermiche, who killed a priest in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, France, in July.
Police raid the home of one of the women suspected of being involved in the planned attack.
President Francois Hollande said: “An attack was derailed. a group has been disbanded, but there are others and we must be able to act each time before it is too late and that’s what we’re doing”. Kermiche and another attacker were shot dead by police.
The auto loaded with gas cylinders belonged to Madani’s father, who flagged her to police on Sunday 14 hours after the vehicle was discovered.
In the case of the abortive gas canister attack on Paris the arrested women appeared to lack expertise in dealing with explosives and left their vehicle abandoned, poorly parked and with its hazard lights on – nearly as if to invite attention.
The women were presented by authorities as “radicalized, fanatical, [who] were likely preparing new violent actions imminently”.
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 radical Islamists.
Madani was already known to intelligence services after trying several times to travel to Syria, the prosecutor said.
The son of a gas delivery driver was briefly detained because he had canisters in his auto. In 1995 when a gas canister with black powder, nails and bolts exploded on a rush-hour suburban commuter train at the St Michel station in an attack blamed on Algerian Islamist militants.
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Men figured nearly exclusively in the recent terrorist attacks in France, but, criminologist Alain Bauer said the use of female fighters and suicide bombers was not new.
