Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said at a news conference that the women were inspired by IS.
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French anti-terror judges charged a woman on Saturday over a failed militant attack near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, where a vehicle full of gas canisters was found last weekend.
A bomb squad, search dogs and a scanner were deployed when a gas canister with a timer but no detonator was found outside a police station Friday morning in the suburb town of La Plaine Saint Denis, just north of Paris, a local police official said. The second was Adel Kermiche, 19, who killed a French Catholic priest as he celebrated mass two weeks after the Bastille night massacre on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais in July.
Later on Thursday, police arrested the boyfriend of one of the women, AFP reported, citing police sources.
The 19-year-old woman, Ines Madani, suffered a leg injury in a Thursday standoff with police in a neighborhood south of Paris.
Teams of police then swooped on the women and in the struggle, Madani was shot in the thigh and the ankle.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Saturday that 293 people have been arrested this year for “links to terrorist networks”. Another woman, arrested earlier in the week, was also in custody. She stabbed a police officer before being shot by anti-terrorism units.
Two gas cylinders were found in the auto, the paper said, adding that the area has been put under heavy security.
According to French authorities, the trio were planning to attack a railway station in the city as early as this week.
The news magazine Le Point said she was already classified as a “dangerous” by intelligences services, having expressed a desire to join ISIL in Syria and involve herself in a “jihadist operation”.
Her fiance and a 15-year-old teenage, a daughter of one of the suspects were also arrested in connection of the foiled attack near the cathedral.
“If it was an attack plot, the method was very odd”, a police source said on Thursday.
A 29-year-old woman whom authorities allege is part of a female “terrorist commando” that tried to carry out an attack near Notre Dame Cathedral is going before a judge for preliminary charges. Police said a total of five women and three men have been arrested.
An interior ministry statement said: “An alert has been issued to all stations but they had planned to attack the Gare de Lyon on Thursday”.
In a sign of fraying nerves, the son of a gas delivery driver was briefly detained because he had canisters in his auto.
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.
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Algeria-linked extremists used gas canisters filled with nails during attacks on Paris in the 1990s.
