Manuel Valls warns of new attacks in France, but says Sarkozy’s proposal to systematically detain all suspects is wrong. She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was looking to go to Syria.
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His comments came after police last week thwarted an ISIS plot to attack the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
The teenager was detained in eastern Paris on Saturday after having been under house arrest since April for suspected links to ISIL members.
“This week at least two attacks were foiled”, Mr Valls said in an interview with Europe 1 radio and i-Télé television on Sunday. The French paper Le Journal du Dimanche reported that she had told investigators that she and another woman had driven around Paris in the early hours of last Sunday morning, initially considering blowing up the vehicle near the Eiffel Tower. “In France, any administrative confinement is subject to subsequent control by a judge”.
Molins said the use of a terrorist cell made up nearly entirely of young women represented a chilling turn in IS tactics, the New York Times reported.
Mr Valls said there were 15,000 people on the radar of police and intelligent services who were in the process of being radicalised.
Earlier this week, three radicalized women were arrested in connection to a auto containing gas canisters that was found a week ago near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Ornella G.’s fingerprints were found in a Peugeot vehicle abandoned last Sunday a few hundred metres from Notre Dame with five gas cylinders and three bottles of diesel fuel inside, according to the probe.
Anti-terrorism prosecutor Francois Molins said Friday that the women were inspired by IS, which has called on its followers to attack France in revenge for air strikes on the group’s bases in Syria and Iraq.
Ornella G, 29, was charged with alleged involvement in a terrorist act and attempted murder.
The probe took on a wider scope with the arrest of Sarah H. Investigators discovered she was to marry Larossi Abballa, the man who killed a police couple in June in their home in Magnanville, outside Paris, before being killed in a police raid. Police sources believe the three were planning another attack.
France has weathered a string of deadly Islamist terror attacks over the summer, most devastatingly the Bastille Day attack in Nice.
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That followed two waves of attacks a year ago, notably the November 13 attacks on restaurants, bars, a concert hall and stadium that left 130 people dead.
