French police arrest ISIS suspects who were targeting a theme park

Anti-terror officers arrested ISIS suspects from the eastern city of Strasbourg and Marseille in the south. The suspects were planning to target a theme park and an area with a high police presence and the arrest came after an investigation by security services that lasted for more than eight months.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 23 November 2016.

In the course of the raids, two handguns, an automatic pistol, a machine pistol and jihadist propaganda were found. The alleged terror ring could have been plotting an attack on a theme park. However, no specific target was revealed.
The seven alleged plotters detained by the police hail from France, Morocco and Afghanistan. Moreover, the four suspects held in Strasbourg, all French, aged between 35 and 37 and not previously known to the intelligence services, were still being interrogated. Two of them are suspected of traveling to Syria in 2015 before returning to Europe.
It may be noted that France is under a state of emergency. This gives security forces enhanced powers to mount surveillance and launch raids. These are after the attacks by Islamic State jihadists on Paris that left 130 people dead.
It may be recalled that France has suffered three major attacks since January 2015 - when gunmen targeted the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket, followed by last November's atrocities in Paris. Then in July, a self-radicalised extremist drove a truck through crowds watching fireworks in the southern city of Nice and killed 86.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org


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Was the EgyptAir crash an act of terrorism by the ISIS?

EgyptAir Flight MS804 has gone missing over the Mediterranean with 66 people on board and there are reports of a merchant ship captain having seen a 'flame in the sky'. Obviously, there are fears that it could be an act of terrorism. The head of France's internal intelligence agency had already warned that France was being 'clearly targeted' by ISIS - and the warning had come a week before the Paris to Cairo flight took off.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 19 May 2016.

An Egyptian civil aviation authority spokesman has revealed that the Airbus A320 with 15 French passengers and one Briton on board has most likely crashed into the sea. The cause of the disaster is not known but it has come seven months after a bomb blew up a Russian airliner over the Sinai desert - it killed all 224 people on board. ISIS has, subsequently, admitted that a soda can bomb had been used to bring down the Metrojet plane.
In this connection, the warnings of Patrick Calvar, the head of France's DGSI agency, are relevant. On 10 May, he had told a parliamentary committee on national defense in Paris that ISIS was planning 'a new form of attack'. France had been targeted twice last year. First it was the Charlie Hebdo attack in January and then the Paris attacks in November. The attack in November killed 130 people and were conducted by suicide bombers and jihadists armed with Kalashnikovs.
He said that a new form of attack was possible because ISIS had suffered military setbacks in Syria and Iraq and wanted to take revenge on members of the coalition, including France because France was behind the air strikes on ISIS targets.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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