Five women were arrested on the night of Saturday to Sunday in the city of Béziers, in southeastern France, in an anti-terrorist operation launched for fear that at least one of them was about to commit an attack in neighboring Montpellier, according to the gala press.
The operation was carried out by agents of the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), while the National Antiterrorist Prosecutor's Office has opened a preliminary investigation for a “terrorist association”.
Judicial sources confirmed to this newspaper that the operation was aimed "particularly at one of the detainees."
The remaining four, including a minor, belong to the "family environment" of the main suspect, they added.
All remained this Sunday in preventive detention while the investigations continued to determine the nature of the possible terrorist project, according to the Agence France Presse.
The agents would have decided to act before the possibility that a "violent action" would be perpetrated "imminently" in Montpellier, about 70 kilometers from Béziers, although at the moment no specific attack project has been identified, reports
Le Point
.
In the search of the house where the women were arrested - an 18-year-old girl who would be the main suspect, as well as her mother and three sisters, according to the magazine - material that can be used for the manufacture of explosives was found, although sources of the investigation later clarified that these are “over-the-counter” products that can also be used for cleaning.
None of the detainees have a police record, although according to
Le Point
, who quotes a local source, "they were known for their radicalization."
Some of them, according to the magazine, watched videos of the Islamic State.
"The Islamist threat is not far off," the mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, told the station France 3 Occitanie.
“This is proof that in Béziers, as in other parts of France, there are terrorist nuclei.
We know that there are people who are watched all year round for their Islamist and terrorist sympathies, and now we see that this happens on the same Easter day, "added the former journalist, who became mayor of Béziers in 2014 from the hand of the far-right Regrouping National.
It is not the first time that radicalized women have been followed by the French intelligence services, recalls
Le Point
, according to which the anti-terrorist forces have observed in recent years an increase in young women among those "likely to take action."
Several experts have pointed out in recent times that women linked to the Islamic State are not, in many cases, mere victims of their husbands or relatives who would have dragged them to Syria or who traveled deceived, but women radicalized and convinced by the model of society Islamist who proposes radical organization.
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In France, four women were arrested in 2016 in Paris on charges of trying to blow up a car near Notre Dame Cathedral.
In 2019, they were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.
At the end of last year, another woman, Hayat Boumeddiene, was also sentenced in absentia to 30 years in prison in the so-called
Charlie Hebdo
trial
.
The young woman, who has been missing for five years, was the partner of Amedy Coulibaly, who perpetrated the attack on a Jewish supermarket in January 2015, two days after the attack on the satirical magazine.
She was found guilty of terrorist criminal association and terrorist financing.
