“This week at least two attacks were foiled”, Manuel Valls said in an interview with Europe 1 radio and Itele television on Sunday.
Advertisement
Previously the authorities said about 10,000 were identified as high-risk.
Sarkozy’s comments come after French President Francois Hollande, a Socialist, took a swipe at his opponents this week, saying their hardline reactions to a wave of militant attacks demonstrated an intent to destroy France’s social model.
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.
It questioned the deployment of between 6,000 and 7,000 soldiers to protect schools, synagogues, department stores and other sensitive sites.
Sarkozy had pushed for “every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because he is in close contact with radicalised people, must be preventively placed in a detention centre”.
Sarkozy took an even tougher approach on Sunday by proposing to systematically place French citizens, suspected of having militant links, in special detention facilities.
On Saturday, French anti-terrorism judges charged a woman over a failed jihadist attack near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, where a vehicle full of gas canisters was found last weekend.
‘There will be new attacks, there will be innocent victims.this is also my role to tell this truth to the French people, ‘ he said.
Ornella G, 29, was charged with alleged involvement in a terrorist act and attempted murder.
Advertisement
The woman was arrested after being linked to a auto that was loaded with gas cylinders and parked just outside Notre Dame cathedral. According to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, the three were likely planning an imminent terror attack. She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was considering going to Syria.
