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(CNN)French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times because terror sleeper cells have been activated over the last 24 hours in the country, a French police source who attended a briefing Saturday told CNN Terror Analyst Samuel Laurent. Ahmedy Coulibaly, a suspect killed Friday during a deadly Kosher market hostage siege, had made several phone calls about targeting police officers in France. The alert came as the lone remaining suspect wanted in connection with a terrorism spree -- Hayat Boumeddiene -- entered Turkey on January 2,...

France is to step up police and military patrols in areas frequented by the public following recent attacks, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has said. He said up to 300 soliders would be deployed around the country to boost security over the Christmas period. The attacks, seemingly unrelated, in Nantes, Dijon and Tours have left more than 20 people injured. In the latest incident, 10 people were hurt when a van was driven into a Christmas market in Nantes on Monday. In Dijon on Sunday, driver shouting "God is great" in Arabic ploughed into pedestrians into pedestrians, injuring 13 people. On...

Dozens of people were injured tonight when a man ploughed his white van into a Christmas market crowd while screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’, Five people were left seriously hurt when the vehicle drove into the pedestrianised Place Royale area of Nantes in France. Within seconds of running down as many people as he could, the driver stabbed himself nine times. It is the third incident of its kind in as many days in the country which have been linked to Islamic terrorism. The man, who is said to be aged 44 but otherwise unidentified, was tonight under armed guard in the...

A French soldier patrolling a business neighborhood west of Paris was stabbed in the neck and injured on Saturday by a man who fled the scene and is being sought by police, President Francois Hollande said. The 23-year-old was patrolling in uniform with two other soldiers as part of France's Vigipirate anti-terror surveillance plan when he was approached from behind around 6 p.m. and attacked with a knife or a box-cutter. A police union spokesman said surveillance footage of the attacker showed him as tall and bearded, aged about 35, possibly of North African origin and wearing a white Arab-style...

The Eiffel Tower was evacuated tonight following a telephoned terrorist bomb warning. Some 1,500 people, including tourists and staff, were escorted out of France's most famous landmark shortly after 7.30pm. It follows threats from Al-Qaeda pledging 'revenge' for the French intervention in the African state of Mali to fight Islamic terrorists. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2301676/BREAKING-NEWS-1-500-people-evacuated-Eiffel-Tower-anonymous-phone-claimed-explosives-placed-landmark.html#ixzz2P5IbOcgI

On January 4, 2008, the Islamist forum Al-Ekhlas (www.ek-ls.org ), hosted by NOC4Hosts Inc. in Florida, USA), posted a message by a participant calling himself Al-Murabit Al-Muwahhid ("The Monotheistic Jihad Fighter"), discussing the possible benefit of a terrorist attack in Paris. The writer speculated that such an attack would bring about the collapse of the French economy, and serve as a warning to other European countries "which are collaborating in the war against the Muslim countries." He added that the attack would also break the "security siege" on the Muslim population of France, and would enable the establishment of terrorist...

A plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up the Eiffel Tower has been uncovered. A scrambled short-wave radio conversation exposing the planned attack on the world's most visited monument was picked up by Portuguese air traffic controllers and passed on to French spy chiefs. The 1,060ft high tower has more than six million visitors a year - an average of more than 16,000 a day. A successful strike on the 7,500 ton iron tower, which was looked down on Paris since 1889, would be a French 9/11 and could cost thousands of lives. The threat was uncovered in a "vague...

.."the processes can be divided into two categories, one material aimed at the most popular sites and most important economically, (Eiffel Tower, Louvre Museum, etc.) and the second directed against important figures [of] Paris, led by the mayor of Paris."

LONG: These are excerpts By Gary J. Schmitt, Reuel Marc Gerecht Posted: Thursday, November 1, 2007 EUROPEAN OUTLOOK,AEI Online, November 1, 2007 (snip) Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelance but organized Islamic extremists. The attacks in 1985 and 1986 were probably Iranian-inspired, carried out as payback for France's military and financial support of Saddam Hussein. The attacks in the 1990s, however, in part an outgrowth of the Algerian civil war, clearly revealed to French security officials that...

PARIS (AFP) — France and the United States share a common view on the security threats facing the two countries, the interior minister said Friday after meeting FBI director Robert Mueller. "We share the same analysis, based on the fact that today there is truly no border between internal security and external security," said Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. Mueller, the head of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, also met with Justice Minister Rachida Dati and officials from the new domestic intelligence agency during his two-day visit to Paris. He said the decision announced last week to merge the DST...

ALGIERS - Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa claimed responsibility Friday for a suicide bombing in Algeria that wounded two French people and one Italian, hours after it had threatened French targets in the region. According to Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, the group claimed to have "killed three foreigners", although Algerian security sources said only that the three were injured alongside six Algerians, five of them police. The attack near Lakhdaria, about 75 kilometers (50 miles) southeast of Algiers, where the group has claimed previous strikes, came just hours after Al-Qaeda called for an offensive against French targets. France said it...

A festival in France dedicated to American music and culture (I know, I was surprised too) has been called off, after organizers received threats “mentioning Al Qaeda.” A Paris festival celebrating US music and culture has been called off following a series of anti-American threats, organisers said on Sunday. Called “Three Days in America”, the festival featuring country and gospel concerts, line-dancing, sales of US paraphernalia and a tribute to Elvis Presley was to take place from May 26 to 28 in Saint Cloud, southwest of Paris. Organisers issued a statement saying they were forced to postpone the event following...

The cellphone's trail led from bloodstained Fallouja to the engineering school here, a modern campus where researchers in white coats stroll past labs and the breeze rustles through trees in courtyards dotted with pine cones. Two years ago French investigators, aided by U.S. intelligence, detected calls from Iraq to a central figure in a suspected extremist cell in Montpellier. French intelligence officials say the calls came from a militant leader in Fallouja involved in the grisly killing of four American military contractors by a mob on March 31, 2004, an incident that became an icon of the savage conflict in...

French police said yesterday they had found explosives, detonators and guns stashed in a suburban Paris garage in swoops this week that have netted 28 suspected Islamist militants, apparently with links to al-Qaida in Iraq. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that questioning suspects detained on Monday had led to arms seizure in Clichy-sous-Bois, outer Paris, on Wednesday. "A certain number of terrorists, in order to finance their activities, are involved in organised crime," Mr Sarkozy said, appearing to confirm earlier reports that the gang raised cash through armed robberies rather than carrying out terrorist attacks. Among arms found were a...

Paris raid nets arms haul Jon Henley in Paris Friday December 16, 2005 The Guardian (UK) French police said yesterday they had found explosives, detonators and guns stashed in a suburban Paris garage in swoops this week that have netted 28 suspected Islamist militants, apparently with links to al-Qaida in Iraq. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that questioning suspects detained on Monday had led to arms seizure in Clichy-sous-Bois, outer Paris, on Wednesday. "A certain number of terrorists, in order to finance their activities, are involved in organised crime," Mr Sarkozy said, appearing to confirm earlier reports that the gang...

LONDON — Western intelligence sources said Al Qaida-aligned cells have procured the SA-18 anti-aircraft missile from the former Soviet Union. The sources said the missiles were smuggled into Turkey and acquired by Al Qaida-aligned cells in the Middle East."These are serious missiles and represents a step up in Al Qaida capability," an intelligence source said. On Oct. 28, the French daily Le Figaro reported that Al Qaida-aligned cells have obtained SA-18s for attacks against French airliners. The daily said the cells acquired the missiles in 2002 from the so-called Chechen mafia.

PARIS (AP) - Authorities fear that a suspected Islamic terror cell broken up in France was plotting attacks on the Paris subway, an airport and an intelligence agency's headquarters, newspapers said Tuesday. Police arrested nine people Monday, including an Islamic militant previously convicted on terrorism charges and freed from prison two years ago, officials said. Le Figaro and Le Parisien newspapers said the alleged cell's suspected targets included the Metro, a Paris airport and the Paris headquarters of the Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, or DST, a police intelligence and counterterrorism agency. The reports did not identify the airport. Le Figaro...

Young European islamists accomodated in Pakistan by terrorist organizations before returning, duly embrigadés, on the Old Continent. The course of three of the London terrorists of July 7 will not have surprised the magistrates of the pole Parisian antiterrorist. Since 2002, their investigations established that at least three French, Hassan el-Cheguer, Hakim Mokhfi and Willy Brigitte, passed by the camps of Lashkar-e-Taiba (Let), been dependent on Al-Qaida. Three members of terrorist networks condemned in France had been dispatched towards the Indian sub-continent Challenged on June 15, 2002, Hassan el-Cheguer and Hakim Mokhfi, 31 years, were put in examination in the...

CRACKDOWN ON RADICALS The French government is to crackdown on suspected Islamic radicals by putting them under tighter surveillance in the aftermath of the latest bombing attempts in London. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said action will be taken immediately to secure the safety of the French people. Mr Sarkozy has pledged to expel Muslim leaders who preach hatred and strip them of their French citizenship. He said: "We have decided it's necessary to improve our means of video surveillance, speed up everything we know about telephone use and data storage and take broad action on the tracking of radical elements."...

In France a man was arrested trying to recruit volunteers who would like to go to Iraq to fight against the American led coalition. According to bizarre media report, a 34-year-old Algerian Islamist was arrested May 9 in the suburbs of Paris, French security sources say. He was giving forged identification cards to volunteers so they could join jihadists fighting U.S. forces in Iraq. The sources add that he does not appear to be connected to other French jihadists networks, such as the one in Paris'' 19th district that got broken up in January 2005 and another one that was...