The French government is seeking to extend the country’s state of emergency laws until after the presidential election, the prime minister has said, as he revealed 17 attacks had been thwarted in the country so far this year.



Bernard Cazeneuve said after a cabinet meeting on Saturday that parliament would vote next week on a bill to extend the powers into 2017.

He said the additional seven-month period was “absolutely necessary” to ensure the highest possible level of protection in the country in the context of next spring’s presidential and general elections.

Cazeneuve said the electoral period may increase the risk of attacks by “those who want to strike our democratic values and republican principles at the heart.”

He said the terrorist threat remained “at a particularly high level” in France and neighbouring European countries.

Cazeneuve said the state of emergency had “fully proven its effectiveness”, with 4,194 house searches in the last year leading to 517 suspects arrested, 434 kept in custody and almost 600 firearms seized, including 77 “weapons of war”.

Among those arrested, 420 had links with terrorist networks, he added.

He said 700 French citizens or foreigners who used to live in France were now in Iraq and Syria, 222 had died there and more than 2,000 were thought to be involved in jihadi networks, including those returning from that region, those hoping to go and those still “in transit”.

Soon after Cazeneuve’s statement at the Élysée palace, the Paris prosecutor’s office said a sixth suspect had been charged in an investigation into an alleged “large-scale” attack that French authorities said had been planned for 1 December.

Last month four suspects were arrested in Strasbourg and one in Marseille. The Strasbourg cell was plotting an imminent attack in France on orders from an Isis member based in Iraq or Syria, the Paris prosecutor François Molins had said.

His office said on Saturday that the sixth suspect – reportedly a 31-year-old man arrested this week in Strasbourg – had been charged with criminal terrorist association.

If the vote in parliament is passed next week it will be the fifth extension since a state of emergency was declared in France the day after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015. The attacks, which left 130 people dead, were claimed by Islamic State.