French police investigating the abandonment of a auto packed with gas cylinders near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral have arrested several suspects and also established that the vehicle contained 3 jerry cans of diesel fuel, judicial and police sources said.
Advertisement
One of the women stabbed a police officer with a knife during the arrest, injuring him in the shoulder.
France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told the BBC that the three women “were fanatics and were in all likelihood preparing an imminent, violent act”.
Officials said his daughter, 19, was known to police for wanting to leave for Syria, where scores of radicalised people of French and other nationalities have joined Daesh.
The owner of the vehicle used in the incident, who was on an intelligence services watchlist of people suspected of religious radicalisation, was initially arrested but was later released due to having gone to police on Sunday to report that his daughter had disappeared with his auto. He had gone to police on Sunday to report that his daughter had disappeared with his auto, officials said.
A bar employee working near Notre Dame had first raised an alarm on Sunday after noticing a gas cylinder in the back seat of a grey Peugeot 607, the police said. The auto had no number plates and its hazard lights were flashing.
“It may have been that they were on a test run”, said a source close to the case.
The man, the auto owner, has been placed on the intelligence services’ watchlist for radicalization.
“There was nobody in the vehicle, and the canisters were not connected to any detonator or explosives”.
More people are still being sought in the Notre Dame case, the prosecutor’s office said.
Police sources had said on Tuesday that no detonator device was found in the auto, but the presence of diesel-filled cannisters added to concerns that there had been a plan to explode the vehicle.
Thousands of extra police and soldiers have been deployed to patrol sensitive sites since 130 people were killed by Islamist gunmen and suicide bombers in attacks on Paris last November. His daughter was among the women arrested.
On July 26, two young men took six hostages in a church in northern France, killed a priest and seriously wounded another. She stabbed a police officer before being shot by anti-terrorism units. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Advertisement
France has been on high alert after a series of attacks in France in November previous year and July.
