Paris terror arrest after gas tanks found in Notre Dame car

[robert99]

Paris terror arrest after gas tanks found in Notre Dame car - BBC News
Paris police have arrested a man on the terrorism watch list after his car was found near the Notre Dame Cathedral with seven gas cylinders inside.

The Peugeot 607 was found with its hazard warning lights flashing and without number plates, police said.

One of the canisters, on the front passenger seat, was empty, and there were no detonating devices inside.

An associate of the car's owner, also known to police, was also arrested, French news agency AFP reported.

Some French media reports said several people had been arrested.

Documents with writing in Arabic were also found in the car, police said.
Arrests made after car containing gas cylinders found near Paris's Notre Dame - France 24
A car containing several gas cylinders was discovered close to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris over the weekend and its owner, who is now in custody, is on an intelligence services watchlist, police said Wednesday.

 

[robert99]

PressTV-Paris police arrest 2 tied to suspicious car
Police in France have made two arrests in relation to a suspicious car found near the highly-popular Notre Dame cathedral in the capital Paris.

Sources said Wednesday that the owner of the Peugeot 607, which had a gas cylinder on the back seat and had been abandoned near the cathedral at the weekend, was arrested a day earlier.

The sources said another person, who is known to the French security services like the owner of the car, was also taken into police custody. They said anti-terror investigators have launched an official probe into the case.

 

[robert99]

Three 'radicalized' women arrested over gas cannisters found near Paris' Notre Dame | News | DW.COM | 08.09.2016
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday that three women aged between 19 and 39 were arrested in connection with the discovery of six gas cylinders in the French capital on Sunday.

Cazeneuve said the suspects were "radicalized fanatics" who were preparing "new violent … and imminent actions."

All three were seized together in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, south of Paris, an inquiry source said. A police officer also suffered a knife wound during the arrest, the source added.

Four other people - two brothers and their girlfriends - were already arrested earlier in the week.

The first couple to be arrested - a 34-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman - are known to the security services for links to radical Islamists.

More people are still being sought in the Notre Dame case, the prosecutor's office said.

Three women arrested over suspicious car likely planning ‘imminent’ attack - France 24
One of the women was wounded seriously during the operation.
The daughter of the car’s owner was spotted by police earlier in the vicinity of the arrests. When police moved to detain the three women, one of them fought back with a knife, injuring a member of France’s internal intelligence agency, a police source told FRANCE 24.

The woman was shot by police several times as she attacked the officer and was in critical condition, the source added.

A total of seven people, including the injured woman, have been arrested by police over the suspicious car.

 

[robert99]

Woman charged over failed terror attack on Notre Dame in Paris
The woman, named as Ornella G, was linked to a women’s terror “commando” that the Paris prosecutor said was guided by Islamic State from Syria. Several women have been arrested in France in recent days as police believed a cell was about to attack Paris’s Gare de Lyon station, days after trying to blow up a car near Notre Dame.

The commando – including a 23-year-old woman who had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out attacks this summer – illustrated how extensive new terror cells have been able to form in France since the November attacks that killed 130 in Paris last year. A 16-year-old boy was also arrested and questioned at the weekend over links to the failed plot.

Ornella G, who has three children, had been previously known to authorities for wanting to go to Syria to join jihadists. She had been arrested at a service station in southern France as she attempted to flee south with her children and ex-partner.

Ines Madani, 19, who is also suspected of taking part in the failed Notre Dame attack, continued to be questioned on Sunday. She was arrested on Thursday in a town south-east of Paris with two other women as they prepared to carry out what officials called another “imminent attack” on a station, probably Paris’s Gare de Lyon. In her handbag, she had a written statement of allegiance to Isis.

Sarah H, aged 23, had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out deadly attacks earlier this year. One of them was Larossi Abballa, who in June murdered a police commander and his police officer partner at their home in Magnanville outside Paris in the presence of their three-year-old son. The other was Adel Kermiche, who slit the throat of an elderly French priest during morning mass in Normandy in July.

Woman charged over failed Paris attack | News | DW.COM | 10.09.2016
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said at a news conference that the women were inspired by IS.

"In the last few days and hours, a terrorist cell was dismantled, composed of young women totally receptive to the deadly Daesh ideology," Molins said, referring to IS by another name.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Saturday that 293 people have been arrested this year for "links to terrorist networks."
French prosecutors charge woman over failed Paris attack - France 24
Cazeneuve added that 17 foreigners had been expelled since the start of the year for posing a "serious threat to public order."

The latest was a Russian national who was expelled to Russia on Friday after the man was jailed for breaching house arrest, he said.

The man’s lawyer said he was a Chechen born in 1991 who had arrived in France as a child and had been placed under house arrest in 2012.

 

[Moll Flanders]

Sarah H, aged 23, had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out deadly attacks earlier this year. One of them was Larossi Abballa, who in June murdered a police commander and his police officer partner at their home in Magnanville outside Paris in the presence of their three-year-old son. The other was Adel Kermiche, who slit the throat of an elderly French priest during morning mass in Normandy in July.

 

[Second Summer]

Sarah H sounds like she's got a peculiar taste in men.

Also sounds like French police and intelligence services have their work cut out for them for a long time to come.

 

[robert99]

Also sounds like French police and intelligence services have their work cut out for them for a long time to come.

and ... France foiling terror plots 'daily' - Prime Minister Manuel Valls - BBC News
The French prime minister has said the country's security services are foiling terror plots and dismantling militant networks "every day".

Manuel Valls said about 15,000 people were being monitored for radicalisation as the country continues its drive against jihadist militants.

A boy of 15 was arrested at his home in Paris on Saturday on suspicion of planning an attack over the weekend.

Investigators said he had been under surveillance since April and he had been in touch with a French member of so-called Islamic State (IS), Rachid Kassim.

(and just to round it off "Mr Sarkozy, who announced in August he would run again for the presidency, gave an interview to the Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (in French).

"Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre," he said." )

 

[Second Summer]

"Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre," he said." )

Sounds like the French prison service will see a lot of demand as well!

 

[robert99]

Three women charged over foiled Paris terror plot - France 24
The suspects -- named as 19-year-old Ines Madani, 23-year-old Sarah Hervouet and 39-year-old Amel Sakaou -- were brought before anti-terrorism judges on Monday and charged with involvement in a terrorist conspiracy.
A fourth woman, Ornella Gilligmann, who has been charged with terrorism over the find, told police she and Madani had tried to set the vehicle alight but fled when they saw a man they believed to be a police officer approach.

Investigators moved quickly to arrest her suspected accomplices, believing them to be on the cusp of staging an attack. (how did they know they were "accomplices"?)

The case has highlighted the possible role of 29-year-old IS member Rachid Kassim, a Frenchman thought to have links to a string of attacks and plotters. Police believe he is directing jihadists over Telegram.

Kassim has regularly appeared in IS propaganda videos shot in Syria or Iraq. He is said to have been in contact with Madani and the 15-year-old boy arrested in eastern Paris at the weekend.

He also exchanged messages with the murderers of priest Jacques Hamel.

 

[robert99]

The young women behind France's 'terrorist commando' network - France 24
By all accounts, the recent gas cylinder plot appears amateurish. But the fact that a group of French women were actively planning an attack has set them apart from their al Qaeda and other militant Salafist sisters.
But the men are having an increasingly hard time doing their jihadist business, with IS group territory shrinking in the Syrian and Iraqi heartlands. In Europe, tightened security has resulted in the thwarting of several terror plots.

If the time has come for Europe’s female recruits to put their propaganda into practice, security experts need to study the female suspects in the recent Paris plot.
(profiles of the arrested women on webpage)
Paris police identify French IS group suspect ‘with key links to terror plots’ - France 24
Rashid Kassim, a French citizen and suspected member of the Islamic State group, has emerged as a key figure in a string of terrorist plots in France, including the arrest of a minor in Paris and a failed gas attack near the Notre Dame Cathedral.
(One only has to think of Charlie Manson's followers to know women can be just as indoctrinated and dangerous as men.)

 

[robert99]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/w...nce-points-to-shift-in-isis-gender-roles.html
Women’s Emergence as Terrorists in France Points to Shift in ISIS Gender Roles

In France, where terrorist threats have become distressingly commonplace, these three episodes, all in the last month, stood out for one reason in particular: Radicalized women were at the heart of each.

Security officials say they are concerned, and they are seeking to understand whether women are beginning to step up because so many men are under surveillance or in detention, or whether recruiters from terror groups are urging women on, in part, as a way to shame more men into taking action.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, said adolescent and postadolescent boys and girls were increasingly involved in jihad in Europe. “And then we have a second category, which is women,” he said.

While the extremist women operating today in France typically proclaim loyalty to the Islamic State and have been in touch with people affiliated with the group, they appear to be acting with guidance and encouragement only from afar, from men either in Syria or in Europe.