France’s domestic intelligence service spearheaded an operation to arrest the teenager in the French capital’s east, police sources told Reuters.
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Using encrypted internet forums to direct recruits on how to undertake attacks on European soil, he is, most recently, suspected of being in contact with an 19 year old woman within a cell of French women behind a failed auto bomb plot.
A French Islamic State extremist has emerged as a link among at least four plots to attack France since June, three people with knowledge of the investigation said.
The French PM revealed this week that some 15,000 potential terror suspects are being watched and that plots to attack France are being foiled nearly on a daily basis.
It is understood he had been tasked with carrying out an attack and had been in touch with Rashid Kassim, a French jihadist with links to the brutal double murder of two police officers in Magnanville in June and the slaying of a priest in Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, near Rouen in July.
President Francois Hollande said this week there are 15,000 on their terror watch list and that planned attacks are being unraveled on an nearly daily basis. In that case, too, Kassim appeared to have a role, namely in bringing the two – Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean – together.
The arrest comes after French authorities stopped two attacks they believe to have been inspired by ISIS, including a planned attack by three women, one a 19-year-old, on Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral using a auto filled with gas cylinders.
“We’re working with extreme intensity to identify those we think are likely to carry out an attack”, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters. But he didn’t elaborate on any direct links between the boy and the IS group.
“The act by these young women remote-controlled by individuals who can be found in Syria among the ranks of Daesh demonstrates that this organization wants to make women into combatants”, said Molins, using another name for the Islamic State group.
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France is now in “an exceptional level of mobilization” following two failed attacks in six days, he added.
