French soldiers patrol near the Louvre Museum in Paris.
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“Every day the intelligence services, the police and the military are preventing attacks, dismantling networks that are coming out of Iraq and Syria”, Valls said on Europe 1 radio.
French prosecutors have charged a woman in connection with a suspected auto bomb found near Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, local media reported Sunday.
French police have arrested a 16-year-old at his Paris home to abort what they feared was a planned weekend attack, as the prime minister warned some 15,000 people in the country could be in the process of being radicalized.
Known to authorities for previously planning to go to Syria, she was arrested in southern France on Tuesday with her boyfriend, who has since been released.
France has been on high alert for terrorists and just last week arrested one woman and detained three others in connection with an attempted vehicle bombing outside Notre Dame Cathedral.
That woman, named as Sarah H., was due to marry Larossi Aballa, the man who killed two police officers in Magnanville, France, in June, according to Paris prosecutor Francois Molins. Video here shows a person on a stretcher being removed from the scene, and shouts of “Alluhu Akbar” can be heard in other clips.
Following the incident, seven people, including four women, were arrested.
His arrest came as he was planning an attack in a public place in the French capital, a source told AFP.
France is on heightened alert after a series of attacks since January 2015 that have killed 238 people and made security a hot topic in campaigning for next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections.
France has been under a state of emergency since the Paris terror attacks in November, and authorities have struggled to monitor thousands of domestic radicals on their radar. “Today the threat is at its maximum and we’re a target”.
“This amounts to networks that have been dismantled and attacks that have been prevented”, Cazeneuve said, giving no further details about the arrests.
“There will be new attacks, there will be innocent victims”, Valls was quoted by various media as saying in the interview.
The women and their associates had already been under surveillance but the discovery of the gas-filled vehicle near Notre Dame had pitted the security forces in “a race against time” to arrest them, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
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Two judicial sources have said the teenager is being held in custody after spending months on house arrest.
