A police car. (drawing) – DENIS CHARLET / AFP
Five women were arrested in the night from Saturday to Sunday in Béziers (Hérault), including one suspected of having wanted to commit a violent action, we learned this Sunday from sources close to the investigation and judicial, confirming a information from Point.
These arrests were made by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) on the basis of elements leading to fear of violent action, it was explained, stressing that the custody had just started and that it was t was to determine the nature of the eventual project.
The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) has opened a preliminary investigation for “terrorist criminal association”. A judicial source said that only one of the arrested was suspected of wanting to commit a violent action. The four other women arrested, the mother and three sisters of the person initially targeted by the operation, were arrested because they were present at the home, said the judicial source. From the same source, at least one of the sisters is a minor.
“Known to be radicalized”
According to Point, these arrests were carried out “in the popular district of La Dévèze”, to the south-east of Béziers. The weekly also said, citing a local source, that these women “were known to be radicalized and, in relation to some of them, to have viewed videos” of Daesh. Even though jihadist-inspired terrorist actions are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, women have already been convicted in France for such acts.
Four women who had become the “face of feminine jihad” according to the anti-terrorism prosecution at the time, including Ornella Gilligmann and Inès Madani who had tried to blow up a car near Notre-Dame de Paris in 2016, had thus been condemned to the assizes in 2019 to sentences of up to thirty years of criminal imprisonment. The appeal trial of Inès Madani and Mohamed Lamine Aberouz is to be held in May in Paris.