Five Russians of Chechen origin were arrested in the Hérault department of southern France yesterday. Police said they discovered "extremely dangerous" explosives in their possession.
However, the prosecutor of Béziers, Yvon Calvet, warned against jumping to conclusions. The men, aged between 24 and 37, were already known to police for criminal activities, not for links to terrorism.
“There is no religious context,” Mr Calvet said.
The judiciary police were less categorical, saying it had “not yet been determined” if a terrorist plot was under way.
The anti-terrorist section of the police does not plan to take over the investigation “for the moment”, Mr Calvet added.
Neither a potential target nor the country where the explosives were intended to be used have been established.
One of the suspects was under police surveillance. He had been linked to an explosion near the university of Montpellier in 2008.
In Paris, the high court asked anti-terrorism magistrates to formally place four men who were arrested on January 16th under investigation for “association with a terrorist conspiracy to commit a terrorist act”.
Coulibaly’s entourage
Eight other people, including four women, who were arrested in the same dragnet were freed. The arrests were made in connection with Islamist violence that killed 17 people in Paris on January 7th, 8th and 9th. All were from the entourage of Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered a policewoman and later killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket.
The prosecutor asked for the four men, aged between 22 and 28, to be mis en examen, which is tantamount to formal charges, on 11 counts of murder and attempted murder; violence with firearms; theft; kidnapping; possession of dangerous weapons and explosives; and financing terrorism.
Authorities say they have evidence the suspects were actively and directly involved in the preparation of the attacks by Coulibaly, including DNA and fingerprints found in the car Coulibaly used to reach the supermarket; wire taps; and information obtained from four days of interrogation.
French police would also like to question Fritz-Joly Joachim, a Franco-Haitian convert to Islam who was arrested in Bulgaria and who was in contact with the gunman Cheerif Kouachi; Coulibaly's wife, Hayat Boumediene, now believed to be in Syria; and Mehdi Belhoucine, who accompanied Boumediene on her journey. Belhoucine's older brother Mohamed is in prison for sending fighters to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Video posting
It is still not clear which, if any, of the four suspects posted a video of Coulibaly, posted after he had been killed, in which he claimed credit on behalf of Islamic State; or who seriously wounded a jogger in a Paris suburb on the first evening of the violence.
Prime minister Manuel Valls yesterday gave the strongest signal yet that the government had recognised that failure to integrate immigrants was a cause of Islamist violence. Mr Valls spoke of "territorial, social and ethnic apartheid" as one of "the ills that gnaw at our country".
In addition to “social impoverishment”, he said, “one must add daily discrimination because one doesn’t have the right surname, the right colour of skin, or because one is a woman”.
