France arrests minor in counterterrorism raid, official says

It is the second time a 15-year-old minor suspected of plotting to kill in the name of ISIS has been arrested in five days.

The unnamed youth was arrested at his home near the Coulée Verte, a “green corridor” walkway in Paris similar to New York’s High Line, where detectives allege he was planning to stab random passers-by last weekend.

Three teenagers linked to an Islamic State group militant have been arrested around Paris in the past week as investigators probe the use of an encrypted messaging app to plot attacks in France, judicial sources said on Wednesday (Sep 14).

Using encrypted internet forums to direct recruits on how to undertake attacks on European soil, he is, most recently, suspected of being in contact with an 19 year old woman within a cell of French women behind a failed auto bomb plot.

The boy’s arrest came after he was “monitored at length” by agents working for France’s DGSI domestic security service, said a source close to the case. The precise role of the extremist, Rachid Kassim, is under investigation, but the officials say he has become a key instigator who directs recruits in encrypted forums on how and where to carry out the Islamic State’s call for European Muslims to strike at home. Earlier this year he was charged with disseminating IS propaganda on the internet.

Who is French jihadist Rashid Kassim?

From the Loire River town of Roanne, the 29-year-old Kassim is believed to be in either Syria or Iraq yet figures in multiple French anti-terror investigations. Prosecutors said the first arrested youth had also used Telegram to contact with Kassim.

Kassim has been linked to the double murder of two police officers in Magnanville in June, as well as to the brutal slaying of the priest in Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, near Rouen in July. Most recently, he was believed to be in contact with a 19-year-old in an unprecedented cell of French women who failed in their attempts to detonate a vehicle bomb near Notre Dame Cathedral and kill police.

The three women were also believed to be planning an attack on a train station or on the police.

Islamic extremists have targeted France repeatedly in the last two years.

France has been under a state of emergency since IS attacks on Paris in November killed 130 people in what President Francois Hollande called an “act of war”.

In July, a Tunisian delivery man killed 86 people when he drove his truck through a crowd on Nice’s seafront.

Valls said that around 15,000 people were known to police in France as having been radicalised, up from a previous estimate of 10,000.