Five ISIS terrorists were planning an attack in France next week, officials said Friday. The plot involved a large cache of weapons and guidance from a Jihadi coordinator in the Middle East.
Four of the terrorists were arrested in Strasbourg and the other in Marseille on Sunday, but the details of the allegations were only revealed by Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins on Friday. The men are due to be charged before a judge later.
Their arrest “thwarted an imminent terrorist attack planned for Dec. 1 on French soil,” Molins told a press conference.
The alleged plot would have come just over a year after a group of ISIS-directed jihadis killed 130 people in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks all over Paris.
Molin wouldn’t say what the alleged target was, but he did reveal that French intelligence services had found “an arsenal of weapons” during the raid in Strasbourg, as well as encrypted mobile-app messages showing the group were “guided remotely” from a coordinator in the region of Syria and Iraq.
Inspection of the suspects’ computers showed a list of potential targets, according to the prosecutor, although he did not name any of the locations. On Thursday, a French security official told Reuters that the possible targets included an amusement park.
All of the suspects had attempted to travel to Syria, and handwritten notes were found during the Strasbourg raid showing the men had pledged allegiance to ISIS, the prosecutor added.
According to Molins, authorities found telephone messages that revealed the men had received specific instructions and GPS coordinates from their contact in the Middle East, telling them where to pick up the weapons and how to use them.
The suspect arrested in Marseilles was identified as a Moroccan named Micham M., who did not have a fixed address and was not previously known to police.
Officials found encrypted messages showing that he was about to receive a large sum of money to obtain weapons in the same manner as the Strasbourg group, Molins said.