A 29-year-old woman has been charged over a failed jihadist attack near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral as French politicians continue to argue about how to deal with the country’s severe terror threat.



The woman, named as Ornella G, was linked to a women’s terror “commando” that the Paris prosecutor said was guided by Islamic State from Syria. Several women have been arrested in France in recent days as police believed a cell was about to attack Paris’s Gare de Lyon station, days after trying to blow up a car near Notre Dame.

The commando – including a 23-year-old woman who had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out attacks this summer – illustrated how extensive new terror cells have been able to form in France since the November attacks that killed 130 in Paris last year. A 15-year-old boy was also arrested and questioned at the weekend over links to the failed plot.

The boy had been under house arrest since France declared a state of emergency after the Paris attacks, two judicial sources said on condition of anonymity. They did not say why he was under house arrest. His arrest on Saturday came as he was planning an attack in a public place in the French capital, one of the sources said.

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, said on Sunday that the current terror threat in France was at “maximum” and that at least two terror attacks had been thwarted in the past week.

In a country that has seen more than 230 people die in terrorist attacks since January 2015, Valls said: “There will be more attacks. There will be innocent victims. Each time I say those words, because it’s my role, I realise the importance and gravity of it.”

He said 700 French jihadis were currently fighting with Isis in Syria, including more than 200 women. French security services were also watching 15,000 people for radicalisation. He rejected repeated calls by the rightwing former president Nicolas Sarkozy for a type of internment in which people suspected of showing signs of radicalisation would be put in special detention centres.

Valls said Sarkozy was wrong to try to “strangle the state of law”. Despite a serious overcrowding problem already facing French prisons, Valls said that 10,000 new prison places had to be created in the next 10 years for isolation cells and dedicated units for radicalised prisoners.

The discovery of a car near Notre Dame cathedral last Sunday containing six gas canisters sparked a security alert. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Ornella G’s fingerprints were found in a Peugeot 607 car that was abandoned last Sunday a few hundred metres from Notre Dame in an area thronging with tourists. The car contained five gas cylinders, three bottles of diesel and a lit cigarette. Two women are suspected of attempting to blow up the car before fleeing when they saw a man they believed to be a plainclothes police officer.

Ornella G, who has three children, had been previously known to authorities for wanting to go to Syria to join jihadis. Her lawyer told French media that she had confessed to investigators. The French paper Le Journal du Dimanche reported that she had told investigators that she and another woman had driven around Paris in the early hours of last Sunday morning, initially considering blowing up the car near the Eiffel Tower.

She has been charged with association with a terrorist group and attempted murder by an organised group. She was arrested at a service station in southern France as she attempted to flee south with her children and former partner.

Ines Madani, 19, who is also suspected of taking part in the failed Notre Dame attack, continued to be questioned on Sunday. She was arrested on Thursday in a town south-east of Paris with two other women as they prepared to carry out what officials called another “imminent attack” on a railway station, probably Paris’s Gare de Lyon. In her handbag, she had a written statement of allegiance to Isis.

Another of the women arrested, referred to as Sarah H, aged 23, had been engaged at different times to two French extremists who carried out deadly attacks earlier this year. One of them was Larossi Abballa, who murdered a police commander and his police officer partner in June at their home in Magnanville outside Paris in the presence of their three-year-old son. He filmed the aftermath on Facebook Live before dying in a police raid. The other was Adel Kermiche, who slit the throat of an elderly French priest during morning mass in Normandy in July.