PARIS — On Friday, President Francois Hollande praised French security forces for apprehending a group of suspected terrorists believed to be plotting another major attack.
On Friday morning, an Interior Ministry official told the Reuters news agency that this foiled attack had been planned for the Gare de Lyon, a train station in the southeast quadrant of the city that is one of the busiest in Europe.
“There’s a group that has been annihilated, but there are others,” Hollande said. “Information we were able to get from our intelligence services allowed us to act before it was too late.”
Still reeling from two major attacks in 2015, the French capital has been on edge since Sunday, when authorities discovered an abandoned Peugeot 607 full of gas cylinders parked near Notre Dame Cathedral, in the geographic center of the city.
The area is a major tourist destination that frequently draws crowds to its pedestrian streets and sidewalk cafes, places similar to those near the seaside promenade struck in the Nice attack in July, which killed 86 and injured hundreds more.
On Thursday, authorities arrested three women outside Paris in connection with this suspected plot – aged 19, 23 and 39, respectively. The youngest of them, identified by the Associated Press as Ines Madani, stabbed a police officer during the confrontation, officials told French media.
According to the RTL radio network, Madani had written a letter pledging her support to the Islamic State. The three women were apparently attempting to avenge the death of Abu Muhammad al-Andani, the Islamic State’s lead propaganda officer killed in Syria in late August, RTL reported.
Before his death, Andani had called on followers of the self-proclaimed caliphate to carry out small-scale attacks on “nonbelievers” in Europe and the United States, an injunction that became a reality in France and Germany this summer. In July, Islamic State-inspired attackers slit the throat of a French village priest, stabbed tourists on a German train, and shot at random in a Munich shopping mall.
According to the Le Monde newspaper, Ines Madani had been known to authorities since 2015, when she attempted, unsuccessfully, to leave France for Syria, where thousands of foreign-born fighters joined the Islamic State in previous years.
Earlier this week, France’s Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, announced that the flow of French citizens and residents decamping for Syria has significantly decreased, raising concerns about the possibility of more domestic attacks by would-be fighters who have opted to stay home as the Islamic State loses territory.
As the country struggles to formulate a plan to prevent future attacks of the type planned on the Gare de Lyon, analysts argue that a stronger intelligence infrastructure must be the primary focus of any policy or plan.
Jean-Charles Brisard, the director of the Paris-based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, argued that an increase in the number of visible military officers, such as those dispatched in the French government’s newly minted Operation Sentinel, pales in comparison to intelligence improvements that have largely been ignored.
In June 2015, largely in response to the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office, the French parliament passed a new intelligence bill that increased the government’s powers to monitor its citizens’ communications.
But, Brisard said in an interview, certain key provisions in this bill – such as the pledged use of ISMI telephone eavesdropping technologies and “black boxes” designed to catch specific threats sent over communication channels – have not yet been enacted, more than a year after the bill was passed.
In this particular foiled plot, investigators only noticed the abandoned Peugeot when a shopkeeper happened to report it. It sat there, lights flashing, for at least two hours, Florence Duthout, the mayor of Paris’s Fifth district, where Notre Dame is located, wrote in a letter to the Paris Police Prefect earlier this week.
In total, seven suspects – two men and five women – have been arrested in the ongoing investigation into the foiled Notre Dame plot. According to an unnamed official quoted in an AP report, one of the men arrested had ties to Larossi Abballa, who live-streamed the murder of a French police officer in June.
The car belonged to the father of Ines Madani, who later reported his daughter to French authorities.
