French anti-terror judges charged a woman Saturday over a failed jihadist attack near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, where a auto full of gas canisters was found last weekend.
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She then pledged to marry Adel Kermiche, a 19-year-old who would die in a hail of police bullets in July after slaying a priest as he celebrated Mass in a small town in northern France, he said.
The Peugeot 607 was found early on Sunday laden with seven gas cylinders and three jerry cans of diesel, said police, adding that no detonators were discovered.
The group “wanted to make the women into fighters”, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Police sources said no detonator had been found in the auto, though the vehicle also contained three jerry cans of diesel fuel.
Hollande’s speech followed a deadly summer in France in which 86 people were killed when a truck ploughed into a Bastille Day crowd in the southern resort of Nice.
The official said the arrest isn’t linked to the arrests last week of four women and a man over aborted attacks.
The French capital was put on high alert last week when French officials said they dismantled a “terrorist cell” that planned to attack a Paris railway station.
French newspaper Le Monde quoted a message from Kassim on Telegram saying: “Women, sisters, go on, attack”.
Laurent Nunez, the police commissioner of the Bouches-du-Rhone region, said no detonation device was found.
A failed vehicle bomb plot near the Notre Dame in Paris was hatched by a group of women guided by IS.
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.
The suspect, a 19-year-old known as Ines Madani, was shot in the leg by police on Thursday evening after she stabbed a police officer with a knife.
More than a third of the almost 700 French citizens who have reached Iraq and Syria are women, according to government figures.
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The teenager arrested this weekend had been under house arrest since France declared a state emergency after the horror slaughter of innocent revellers in Paris on November 13. According to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, the three were likely planning an imminent terror attack. The note also stated that in answer to the call of the No. 2 IS leader, killed in August, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, “I attack you in your lands to mark your minds and terrorize you”, Molins said in an account of the arrests.
