A French prosecutor yesterday branded a homegrown group of Islamist extremists as the biggest terror threat the country has faced since the Algerian-based GIA carried out a string of deadly bombings in the 1990s.
Announcing that he would pursue charges of attempted murder and terrorism against seven of 12 suspects arrested at the weekend, prosecutor Francois Molins said they had been part of a terrorist cell that was "probably the most dangerous in France since 1996".
The group, he said, had been plotting to attack targets in France and to join "jihadists" in Syria and elsewhere. The profile of the suspects in custody was "much more dangerous than we initially assumed".
The GIA, or Armed Islamic Group, emerged from Algeria's civil war and was responsible for a string of bombings in France in 1995 and 1996. One of the attacks, on the St Michel metro station in Paris, killed eight people.
The perpetrators of that attack were convicted in 1999, by which time the threat posed by the group had been neutralised as a result of arrests.
The charges against the suspects detained at the weekend relate to a grenade attack on a Jewish grocery store in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles last month.
The attack left one person slightly injured but Molins said the Yugoslav-made grenade could have seriously injured anyone within a 10-metre radius.