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France arrests alleged terrorist cell members

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday that the dawn arrests of suspected Islamic radicals were part of a continuing campaign to smash an extremist cell.

Sources said police made a number of arrests, in particular in the Montargis region in the north-central department of Loiret.

They said they had two main targets, French converts to Islam aged between 25 and 35 years, who had been the subject of investigations for two years over links to Safe Bourrada, 35, a convicted Islamic extremist.

"It is the pursuit of the same inquiry, it's the same network," Sarkozy told a French radio station.

"These are long term inquiries because a certain number of individuals have been under surveillance for months, even years, and at the moment the specialist services judge it necessary, arrests take place," he said.

On Sept. 26 four men, including Bourrada, were detained at Trappes and Evreux, west of Paris and placed under investigation for alleged criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise and for financing of terrorism.

Bourrada was sentenced to jail in 1998 for participating in a series of metro bomb attacks in Paris that killed eight people in 1995 but was freed two years ago.

At least one of the suspects was said to have confirmed to investigators that the group planned to carry out attacks in the capital, targeting the headquarters of the French domestic intelligence service, the metro and Orly airport.

But it was not clear whether they had repeated their admission to the judicial authorities.

Sources told reporters that the suspects called their group Ansar al-Fath, and linked it to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the main armed Islamist movement in Algeria with links to al-Qaeda. The GSPC has named France as "enemy number one."

French authorities ordered last week's raids after the Algerian government told them about the alleged plot it discovered during the questioning of another suspected member, M'Hamed Benyamina, 34, arrested at the airport in Oran, Algeria on Sept. 9.

Sarkozy said those picked up last week were not "on the point" of carrying out attacks but "had evil intentions."

A source close to the investigation said last week that the cell could have carried out the attacks "very quickly."
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