Paris - The terrorist attacks in Paris were “organised, thought out, planned out of Syria,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Monday, hours after France launched airstrikes against Islamic State in its stronghold of al-Raqqa in Syria.
Valls told broadcaster RTL that more than 150 raids were carried out across the country overnight.
France Info reported that only one of the searches was directly linked to the near simultaneously string of shootings and explosions in Paris on Friday that left more than 130 people dead and about 350 injured.
Valls warned that European countries face an ongoing risk of terrorist attacks.
“We know that operations were being prepared and are still being prepared, not only against France, but against other European countries.”
“This generation will have to live a long time with this terrorist threat. We must live, and live fully, but under this threat,” he said.
Police arrested five people in the south-eastern city of Lyon and seized a rocket launcher among an arsenal of weapons, French news agency AFP reported, in raid not connected to the attacks.
The north-eastern Paris suburb of Bobigny was raided on Sunday night, AFP said, as were several areas in the southern French city of Toulouse, near the former home of Mohamed Merah, who attacked French Muslim soldiers and a Jewish school in March 2012, killing seven people.
One of the suspects in the Paris attacks was stopped by police driving through northern France but not detained, the newspaper Le Monde reported on Sunday night.
Salah Abdeslam, 26, was stopped in a car with two others amid tightened border controls. Belgium, where he was already known to the authorities, has issued an international arrest warrant for him.
His brother Brahim Abdeslam, 31, blew himself up on the Boulevard Voltaire, near the Bataclan concert venue, on Friday night,
AFP reported. He was a French citizen and resident in Belgium.
A third brother, Mohamed Abdeslam, was among seven people detained for questioning in Brussels. The brothers were not on French
intelligence files, the report said.
Authorities believe that three coordinated teams of assailants armed with Kalashnikovs and explosive vests carried out the attacks on Friday, including at the Bataclan and a football stadium.
The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the attacks.
French President Francois Hollande called the attacks an “act of war” and promised a “ruthless” response against Islamic State, which claimed responsibility.
The epicentre of the struggle against Islamic State “is not in Syria but primarily in Iraq. That is where the future is at stake,” Valls told RTL on Monday.
France was fighting Islamic State in Iraq alongside the Iraqi national forces, Iran, the United States, he said, “while we have decided to deploy our Mirage and Rafale [fighter jets] in Syria.”
The French Defence Ministry said the airstrikes involved 10 French planes that dropped 20 bombs, destroying a commando position where munitions were stored and a training camp for terrorists.
DPA