Five suspects arrested in and around Paris were French Islamists planning a terror attack, French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux has said.
BBC News
11 November 2010
The five were detained on suspicion of having trained as militants in the Afghan-Pakistan border region, security sources said at the time.
But Mr Hortefeux said only one of the five had visited Afghanistan while others had planned to go to Pakistan.
One of the four men and one woman had been ready to die, he added.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden warned France last month that its planned ban on the Islamic full-face veil in public places and its involvement in the war in Afghanistan justified attacks on its nationals.
Mr Hortefeux said then that the country faced a real terror threat and he urged “total vigilance”.
‘Jihadi sites’
The five suspects are all French nationals, some of them of Algerian origin, and “clearly belong to the radical Islamist movement”, the minister told reporters.
“What we can say is that, over the last few days with these arrests… there was what we call a conspiracy to prepare a terror attack,” he said on a visit to police and soldiers at Montparnasse railway station in Paris.
The suspect who visited Afghanistan “was unquestionably very familiar with jihadi internet sites”, according to the minister.
Read the rest at BBC News.
