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French police arrest 15-year-old suspected of planning terror attack

Ornella G. was remanded in custody after being charged with association with a terrorist group and attempted murder by an organised group, prosecutors said.

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The prosecutor, Francois Molins, whose office handles terrorism investigations, said Friday that the woman’s fingerprints were found last Sunday in a vehicle containing a half-dozen gas cylinders and left parked in front of Notre Dame, in the heart of Paris.

A woman identified by authorities as Ornella G., was the first to be arrested, on Tuesday with a companion at a highway stop near the southern city of Orange.

Mr Molins said the investigation of the aborted attack had led to the dismantling of a “terrorist commando of young women” aligned with the Islamic State group.

Ines Madani and two other women – named as Amel S., 39, and 23-year-old Sarah H. – were arrested Thursday before they could carry out an attack on a rail station in Paris, prosecutors said.

Also the attack in Copenhagen in 2015 where a Synagogue was attacked after several shots were fired on a Free Speech meeting with Swedish artist, Lars Vilks.

Earlier in the day, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that an anti-terrorism operation led to the arrest of three women linked to an abandoned vehicle containing gas cylinders on Thursday.

“If it was an attack plot, the method was very unusual”, a police source said on Thursday.

TV footage showed a policeman leaving the scene of the arrests on the outskirst of Paris carrying a large knife.

The hunt for the women, who authorities said were guided from Syria, had been “a race against time” before they could strike again, said Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who is overseeing the fight against militant extremists who have killed more than 200 people in France in the past 10 months.

One of the women has been linked to one of the priest’s killers as well as to a jihadist who stabbed a police couple to death at their home in a Paris suburb in June.

Laurent Nuñez, the police commissioner of the Bouches-du-Rhône region, said no detonation mechanism was found.

An estimated 700 French nationals are fighting in Syria and Iraq, including 275 women and dozens of children.

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 for having links to terrorism.

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France is already on high alert after a number of attacks where hundreds of people have been killed in the last few years.

Frenchwoman charged over suspected Notre Dame car bomb