Updated September 9 at 1:19 p.m.
NEWS BRIEF French authorities announced Friday the arrest of a 19-year-old woman believed to be planning an attack after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, Agence France-Presse reports.
The woman, identified as Ines Madani, was arrested alongside a 23-year-old woman and a 39-year-old woman Thursday in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, a suburb south of Paris, in connection with a discovery by French police Sunday of a vehicle found containing seven gas cylinders near Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Though no detonator was found, police feared the car, a Peugeot 607 left with its hazard lights flashing without license plates, would be used for an attack.
Investigators say Madani, believed to be the daughter of the vehicle’s owner, was the primary suspect behind the foiled attack. Reuters reports the Peugeot’s owner alerted police Sunday of both his daughter and the car’s disappearance, further adding the daughter had been known to police for expressing aspirations to travel to Syria. One source close to the investigation said authorities found a letter in the woman’s possession in which she pledged her allegiance to the Islamic State.
Prosecutors said Friday that one of the women, known only as Sarah H., was found to have been engaged to be married to two men linked to attacks carried out earlier this year. Larossi Abballa, 25, was killed in a police raid in Magnanville after he pledged his allegiance to ISIS and killed a policeman and his partner in June. The other, 19-year-old Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean, was identified as one of two attackers responsible for the killing of a French priest during a church service in Normandy in July.
