French officials arrested three “radicalized” women, who authorities said were likely plotting an imminent attack, after police discovered a vehicle loaded with gas canisters near the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris last weekend.
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According to investigators, her fingerprints were found in the Peugeot vehicle which was discovered abandoned last Sunday a few hundred metres (yards) from Notre Dame with five gas cylinders and three bottles of diesel fuel inside.
It is also alleged Kassim guided one of the women arrested last week in the plot to attack a train station in Paris.
The latest was a Russian national, Mansur Kudusov, who was expelled to Russia on Friday after being jailed for breaching house arrest, he said.
A bomb squad with dogs and a scanner was deployed when a gas canister with a timer but no detonator was found outside a police station on Friday morning in La Plaine Saint Denis, just north of Paris, and one kilometre from the Stade de France in Saint Denis, police said.
Ines Madani was one of five sisters and had already tried to leave for Syria before, Molins said.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve speaks to journalists after a meeting with vice-president of the French Council of The Muslim Faith and President of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) on August 24, 2016 in Paris.
Anthropologist Dounia Bouzar, who has worked with hundreds of radicalized French youngsters and their parents, said she was not surprised that women had been among those arrested in a terrorism investigation.
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.
“Every day intelligence services, police and gendarmerie thwart attacks and dismantle Iraqi-Syrian networks”.
The raid left one of the women shot in the leg and two police officers stabbed, authorities said.
He said 700 French jihadists were now fighting with Isis in Syria, including more than 200 women.
RTL TV later reported that the women were planning to set the canisters on fire, but something reportedly went wrong, and they had to hurriedly leave the site.
In May, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s DGSI internal security agency, said he was confident ISIS would “reach the stage of auto bombs”.
Valls added that despite the plots uncovered, “There will be new attacks”.
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France has been on high alert since January of 2015, when it was hit by a series of Islamic State-linked terrorist attacks.
