The 17 -year -old was placed in pre -trial detention. He is a “particularly fragile child” with suicidal ideas, in the words of his lawyer.
The banal arrest last Monday of a 17-year-old teenager from Vesoul, in Haute-Saône, may well allow the police to avoid the worst. Arrested in front of his school on March 10 in possession of a knife, the young man had initially been placed in police custody for “port of prohibited weapon of category D”, reveals The Parisian. But according to information from the Ile -de -France daily, after having briefly heard the minor, the local police quickly passed the hand to the DGSI investigators, the French internal intelligence service.
A first 48 -hour interrogation then makes it possible to “confirm the exact targets of the draft violent action and its imminence”, specifies the anti -terrorist package to AFP. And for good reason, the teenager was recently the subject of surveillance because of his words deemed proselytes and praising terrorist acts on social networks as well as encrypted messaging like Telegram. According to RMC information, the adolescent was already followed by the intelligence services between 2022 and 2024 due to his religious radicalization.
“Put an end to your life to stop a deep discomfort”
In some of his messages, this Daesh fanatic did not hesitate to entrust his ambition to commit a terrorist attack. His objective: to take action in his region by the end of the month of Ramadan, a sacred month for the Muslims marked by the practice of fasting, by next March 30. But, as the investigations, no date seemed to be fixed. And for the young man’s lawyer, a whole other version prevails, it is the one he defends for the moment. The latter told AFP that his client wanted to “end his life to stop a deep discomfort” and not “commit a terrorist action.” “My client is a minor, so he is a child in the sense of many international conventions (…)He is a particularly fragile child. It is not radicalized, “insists Me Éri Ghilaci. A version far from the bombing project for the moment attributed to the young man.
His target also did not seem to be stopped at this stage. The adolescent, however, planned to aim for a symbolic place as a religious establishment, church or synagogue, or diplomatic, embassy or consulate preferably American or Israeli, it seems.“The coming investigations on the Rogatory Commission will confirm the exact targets of the draft violent action and its imminence,” said the national anti -terrorist prosecutor’s office with BFMTV.
While the investigation must still determine with precision the degree of advancement of his attack project, the one who claims to be of the Islamic State had already informed about the making of unstable TATP explosives, particularly popular with terrorist organizations. The young man was presented this Thursday, March 13 to an anti -terrorist investigating judge in Paris on Thursday, after his two days of police custody with internal intelligence.
From now on, he returns to the anti -terrorist magistrate to put him under investigation or not, and safety measures could be ordered against him. His placement in pre -trial detention was required by the prosecution which opened a judicial information for association of criminal terrorist criminals. According to Le Parisien, this is the first attack thwarted this year in France.While since 2015, 79 terrorist attacks have been thwarted, the national anti -terrorist prosecution believes that the terrorist threat is still “very high” in France.