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France arrests 15-year-old boy for planning ‘imminent’ Paris attack

She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was looking to go to Syria.

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It is also alleged Kassim guided one of the women arrested last week in the plot to attack a train station in Paris.

The women and their associates had already been under surveillance but the discovery of the gas-filled auto near Notre Dame had pitted the security forces in “a race against time” to arrest them, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

“Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre”, Sarkozy said in the interview.

“Today the threat is at a maximum, and we are a target”, Valls said on Europe 1 radio.

Valls also warned that the country faced a threat from 15,000 others in the country who were on the radar of police and intelligent services.

“And don’t tell me it would be Guantanamo”, Mr Sarkozy said in the interview. “In France, any administrative confinement is subject to subsequent control by a judge”.

Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, opened by former United States President George W. Bush, was used to hold prisoners rounded up overseas after the USA became embroiled in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following the September 11, 2001 attacks on NY and Washington.

Valls said almost 15,000 people in France are being tracked because they are suspected of being in the process of radicalization, while 1,350 are under investigation 293 of them for alleged links with a terrorism network.

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.

The discovery of an abandoned vehicle early last Sunday led investigators to the arrests of three more women and a man that revealed links to two attacks this year in France claimed by the Islamic State group and underscored the overlapping nature of the terrorist web. Mr Molins said she had tried several times to travel to Syria.

Another woman, Ornella G, arrested on Tuesday, was charged by a French judge on Saturday in connection with the auto found near Notre Dame cathedral.

Sarah H. had promised to marry Larossi Abballa, 25, who died in a raid in a Paris suburb after killing two police employees and taking their infant hostage in June, Mr. Molins said. The three were planning another attack, according to police sources.

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“Everyone gets that. This past week at least two attacks were stopped”.

Frenchwoman charged over suspected Notre Dame car bomb