Terrorism In France: 4 Arrested In Montpellier Were Making Bombs, Planning Attack In Paris

Antiterrorism authorities arrested four people in the southern French city of Montpellier Friday morning, discovering a trove of bombs “in the process of construction” and intercepting “an imminent plan for an attack on French soil,” Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux’s office said in a government press release.

Three of the four individuals, one of whom was a 16-year-old girl, were “directly suspected of preparing a violent action on our land,” the interior ministry note said. The two-week investigation leading up to the arrest involved the anti-terror unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office as well as the French National Police Intervention Force, a special response unit.

The same day as the arrest, Le Roux had delivered an address to the French National Assembly on his plans to combat the ever-present threat of terrorism in France. He noted the importance of working with allies in Europe and increasing “surveillance of the broadest scope” and “detection of faint signs of radicalization.” France has prevented more than 210 foreign nationals suspected of having links to jihadist groups from entering or staying in France, he added. Still, such efforts may only go so far, as all of the attackers involved in the Nov. 13, 2015 shootings and suicide bombings in Paris, the deadliest attack in the country since World War II, were European nationals.

The arrests also came on the heels of a Feb. 3 attack at the Louvre museum in Paris by a lone assailant wielding a machete. Abdallah el-Hamahmy, an Egyptian reportedly living in the United Arab Emirates, denied any affiliation with the Islamic State terrorist group, Le Parisien reported. He shouted “Allahu Akbar” when he assaulted soldiers at the entrance to the museum.

France has been a hot spot for terrorism since a three-day attack in the city that began Jan. 7, 2015 when gunmen assaulted the Paris office of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, ending with a hostage situation in a kosher supermarket. Since then, the country has endured a deadly assault by a truck driver on a Bastille Day crowd in the southern city of Nice, an ISIS-related stabbing in the northern town of Magnanville and a violent hostage crisis by an alleged jihadist at a church in a suburb of the city of Rouen.