Posted on 11/21/2016 6:02:34 AM PST by csvset
France said it had foiled a militant plot and arrested seven people in the southern port city of Marseille and the eastern city of Strasbourg.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the seven people of French, Moroccan and Afghan origin, aged 29 to 37, had been detained on Sunday.
Two were arrested in Marseille. Most of the others, he said on Monday, were arrested in Strasbourg - a city where one of oldest and largest Christmas markets is set to open this week.
An attack has been foiled ... The scale of the terrorist threat is enormous and it is not possible to ensure zero risk despite everything we are doing, he added.
He gave no information on the target of the planned attack. But a source close to the inquiry told Reuters that Strasbourg had not been targetted.
The mayor of Strasbourg said it appeared that the plot had focused on the Paris region.
Islamist militants killed 17 people in Paris in January 2015 in an attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. Another 130 people were killed when gunmen and suicide bombers attacked the capital in November 2015, and 86 more were killed when a man drove a truck into crowds in the city of Nice on July 14.
Islamic State, whose strongholds in Syria and Iraq are being bombed by French jets, has urged followers to continue attacking France.
We shouldn’t get too upset about 7 lone wolves.
We need to find out the REAL reason they are so upset at us.
YouTube video, I'm sure of it. /s
No, no, no. "Militants". /s
It would be easier, Frenchies, if you would just keep the savages out in the first place.
It would be easier if we did the same thing.
“...it is not possible to ensure zero risk...”
Sure there is, but you politically correct wussies would rather see the streets run red with the blood of your countrymen, than admit what must be done.
Strasbourg, a very beautiful city on the border of France and Germany.
Île Saint-Joseph appears to have some availaable real estate.
Seems like there's a word for a group of seven lone wolves...
Grey wolf: The average pack consists of a family of 511 animals (12 adults, 36 juveniles and 13 yearlings)
French authorities on Wednesday extended by 96 hours the detention of five men arrested over the weekend in connection with the planned attacks, which investigators now believe was intended to strike targets in and around Paris on December 1.
Police sources said that targets included the headquarters of Frances domestic intelligence agency (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure or DGSI) in the northwestern Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret, the police offices at the Quai des Orfèvres and the nearby Palace of Justice.
Other targets included the Disneyland Paris amusement park 32 kilometres (20 miles) east of the city and the famed Champs-Elysées boulevard.
The information was collected from a smartphone belonging to one of the suspects taken into custody after simultaneous police swoops in the southern port city of Marseille and Strasbourg in northeast France last Saturday night.
Two other men also arrested in the raids have since been released.
France has been under a state of emergency since a wave of attacks last year, giving police wider powers, and the arrests come at a sensitive time ahead of next springs presidential elections in which security will be a major theme.
Officials are worried that the Islamic State group, which is fighting to defend territory it seized in Syria and Iraq, will call on its followers and jihadists returning from the region to increase attacks in the West.
More than 230 people have been killed in attacks on French soil since January 2015, including 130 in coordinated gun and suicide bomb strikes in Paris last November.
As part of sweeps against Islamist radicals, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Wednesday that his government had banned a Muslim charity suspected of financing jailed militants and radicals.
The charity, established in 2010 and called Sanabil, plans to contest the decision and rejected what Cazeneuve said of it, according to Sanabil lawyer Bruno Vinay. The recent arrests were part of a long-running operation led by the DGSI, which included a wave of arrests last June on the eve of the Euro 2016 international soccer championship that France hosted.
That swoop concerned militant financing while last weekends arrests were related to potential gunmen, police sources said.
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