French police yesterday arrested seven men and women suspected of plotting to blow up the US embassy in Paris.

The arrests resulted from the confession of Mr Djamel Beghal (35), a French-Algerian dual national. Mr Beghal was detained at Dubai airport at the end of July, reportedly en route from Afghanistan to Europe.

Mr Beghal allegedly told Emirati police that he travelled via Pakistan to Jalalabad, Kabul and Kandahar to join the followers of Osama bin Laden. It is not clear how officials in the Emirates induced him to talk.

In Afghanistan, Mr Beghal reportedly received weapons and explosives training and Koranic lessons. According to Europe 1 radio station, a man named Mr Abu Zubeida, the "right arm" of bin Laden, ordered Mr Beghal to return to France and set up a "cyber cafe" to provide cover and easy communication for other militants. He and Mr Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who had been a football player in Germany, were to drive a van filled with explosives into the US embassy.

Mr Trabelsi was among several radical Islamists arrested since the attacks in the US. Belgian police found maps of the US embassy in their raids. French police detained Mr Trabelsi's pregnant wife in Corsica for two days this week.

Nearly 50 people were placed under surveillance in France, Belgium and Holland on the basis of Mr Beghal's confession. Mr Jean-Louis BrugiΦre and Mr Francois Ricard, the "anti-terrorist" judges who ordered the seven pre-dawn arrests in Paris yesterday, had opened a formal investigation into the alleged plot to bomb the US embassy the day before the attacks on New York and Washington.

Following Mr Beghal's confession, the French intelligence agency, DST, reportedly observed suspects staking out the embassy on the Place de la Concorde. French judges wanted to keep the men under surveillance longer, but were forced to act when the suspects were alerted by arrests in Belgium and Holland.

Judge BrugiΦre is on his way to Dubai to question Mr Beghal, whom he would like to extradite to France. The DST describes Mr Beghal as a radical Islamist of the Salafist tendency, which advocates a return to the original precepts of Islam. He has lived in Germany and Britain and is said to be an "emir", or leader, among radical Islamists in Europe. The information given by Mr Beghal led to several US State Department warnings, the last of which, in early September, cited bin Laden as the source of the threat.

Reuters adds:

German prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for two Arabs who lived in Germany and are suspected of involvement in last week's attacks in the US.

Federal prosecutor Mr Kay Nehm said its investigations into three suspected hijackers had not revealed any link with bin Laden.

He said one man was originally from Morocco and the other from Yemen. Both studied in Hamburg.