French police investigating the discovery of a auto containing 6 gas cylinders in Paris, on Thursday arrested 3 female suspects said to have been planning new acts of violence, shooting one of them in the process.
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France has been hit by a series of terror attacks claimed by the Islamic State.
A nationwide manhunt was sparked, leading to the detention of three women who, police say, “were possibly planning to blow up the car”.
“An alert has been issued to all stations but they had planned to attack the Gare de Lyon on Thursday”, an interior ministry official said on Friday.
Authorities had said earlier they were searching for the two daughters of the owner of the Peugeot 607.
The women who spearheaded the failed plot included a 19-year-old whose father owned the abandoned Peugeot vehicle.
“These three women aged 39, 23 and 19 had been radicalize, were fanatics and were in all likelihood preparing an imminent, violent act”, Cazeneuve said in a televised statement.
One of the security officials, who was not authorized to be publicly identified, said French authorities found a note on Madani declaring allegiance to the extremist group, which has called on followers to attack France.
The 19-year-old French woman arrested on Thursday night was named by Associated Press as Ines Madani.
Francois Hollande, the French president, meanwhile said police had “destroyed” an Islamic State cell, but warned there were others.
The man, arrested late Thursday, was known to intelligence services for links to radical Islam, the sources said.
French daily Le Figaro reported on Wednesday the vehicle – with registration plates missing and its hazard lights flashing – was parked at Quai de Montebello, in the capital’s fifth arrondissement, just a few meters from the iconic cathedral on Paris’ Ile de la Cite by the Seine river.
Investigators are trying to establish whether any of those arrested and questioned have links with Hayat Boumeddiene, the girlfriend of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a police officer and four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015.
Security around Paris was visibly higher Friday as the investigation widened.
Although that cylinder was empty, five full cylinders were discovered in the boot. Police sources said no detonator device was found in the vehicle, but the diesel canisters raised concerns that the auto was planned to explode.
“If it was an attack plot, the method was very unusual”, a police source said on Thursday.
The discovery followed a deadly summer in France in which 86 people were killed when a truck plowed into a Bastille Day crowd in the southern resort of Nice.
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On July 26, two young men took six hostages in a church in northern France, killed a priest and seriously wounded another.
