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Arrests over car abandoned in Paris ‘shut down terror cell’
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A 19-YEAR-OLD woman who was arrested in an investigation into a car found laden with gas cylinders in Paris had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and was preparing an imminent attack, officials said yesterday.
French President Francois Hollande said a terror cell had been shut down and an attack “foiled,” after Ines Madani and two other women were arrested.
Police shot and wounded Madani as they swooped on her and her accomplices — aged 23 and 39 — in a suburb south of Paris on Thursday.
Investigators believe Madani is the main suspect in their investigation into a Peugeot 607 found a few hundred meters from Notre Dame cathedral last Sunday.
She is the daughter of the car’s owner.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the three women “were apparently preparing new, violent and, what is more, imminent actions.”
The women were “radicalized and fanaticized,” he said.
Madani had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State group in a letter found in her possession, according to a source with the investigation.
A police officer suffered a knife wound to the stomach during the arrests in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, south of Paris.
Hollande, speaking on a visit to Athens, said: “An attack has been foiled.”
“A group has been destroyed,” he said, but he warned: “There are others.”
A police source said security services had issued a warning on Thursday about a possible attack on train stations in Paris and the area where the women lived.
Police are now convinced that the car found with five full gas cylinders in its boot was intended to be used in an attack.
The car was discovered with its hazard lights flashing. Its license plates had been removed.
Three bottles of diesel fuel were also found in the vehicle, but there were no detonators.
Police said the boyfriend of one of the three women was also arrested on Thursday.
The man’s brother is himself in custody over suspected links to Larossi Abballa, a jihadist who killed a police officer and his girlfriend in a Paris suburb in June, a source said.
Four people — two brothers and their girlfriends — are already in custody over the discovery of the car.
The first couple arrested, a 34-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, have been held since Tuesday and are known to the security services for links to radical Islam. Police then arrested the man’s brother and his girlfriend, both aged 26.
France is on high alert after Islamic State called on its followers to attack the country in revenge for airstrikes on its bases in Syria and Iraq.
It has claimed responsibility for a string of jihadist attacks, including last November’s coordinated bloodshed in which gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people.
Cazeneuve told French daily La Presse yesterday that 260 people had been arrested in connection with terrorist networks or operations since the beginning of the year.
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