(Paris) A 22-year-old Afghan was indicted and imprisoned on Saturday in France, accused of being attached to the ideology of the Islamic State (IS) and of having “fomented” a “project of violent action » in a football stadium or shopping center.
His arrest, which took place on Tuesday in Haute-Garonne, has “links” with the arrest of an Afghan living in the United States and charged on Wednesday with planning an attack on the day of the American elections, said the national anti-terrorism prosecution (PNAT). ), confirming a source close to the matter interviewed by AFP.
This 27-year-old Afghan, residing in Oklahoma, was in contact on Telegram messaging with a person identified by the FBI as an IS recruiter, according to American judicial authorities.
Read the article “FBI arrests Afghan who planned attack on US election day”
According to the source close to the matter, during their investigations, the American authorities transmitted information to the French authorities, triggering the opening of an investigation in Paris and leading to three arrests.
Tuesday morning, in the south-west of France, three men, aged 20 to 31, two of whom are brothers, were arrested in Toulouse and Fronton by investigators from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) , supported by the RAID, police intervention unit, as part of a preliminary investigation opened on September 27 for “terrorist criminal association with a view to preparing one or more crimes of personal injury”.
“The investigations carried out revealed the existence of a planned violent action targeting people in a football stadium or a shopping center instigated by one of them, aged 22, of Afghan nationality and holder of a residence card, several elements of which also establish radicalization and adherence to the ideology of the Islamic State,” the PNAT indicated on Saturday.
His lawyer, Me Emanuel de Dinechin did not wish to speak at this stage.
In accordance with the PNAT requisitions, he was indicted for terrorist conspiracy by an investigating judge, then placed in pre-trial detention.
According to a source close to the matter, this young man comes from the Tajik community of Afghanistan and his project, which he spoke about on Telegram, remained quite vague and incomplete.
According to another source close to the investigation, he has lived in France for around three years.
The other two men were released after their custody.
“Reconfiguration” of IS
The last arrests for a planned violent action in France date back to the end of July.
Two young men, aged 18 and from Gironde (South-West), were indicted on July 27, suspected of having created a group on social networks “intended to recruit” people “motivated [pour] perpetrate violent action” during the Paris Olympic Games.
In total, three attacks were foiled during the Olympics period, according to the authorities. In addition to the two young people from Gironde, one of the projects targeted establishments, in particular bars, around the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium in Saint-Étienne (South-East), and the other came from a group which had planned attacks against institutions and representatives of Israel in Paris. Five people were indicted, including a minor teenager, in these cases.
The “jihadist threat represents 80% of the procedures” carried out by the PNAT, recalled anti-terrorism prosecutor Olivier Christen in mid-September. “In the first half of 2024, there were approximately three times as many procedures” of this type as over the same period in 2023, he added.
This increase is explained, according to him, by the “geopolitical context”, but also by “the reconfiguration, particularly in Afghanistan” of the Islamic State group.
In September, two attacks by the Islamic State group in Khorasan (IS-K), the regional branch of IS in Afghanistan, killed around twenty people in that country.
The deadliest attack by EI-K left 145 dead in March in a concert hall in Moscow.