Mehdi Nemmouche, the Franco-Algerian who was accused of killing four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last May, planned a major attack at France’s Bastille Day celebration, a French daily newspaper reported Monday.
Nemmouche made headlines this weekend in France following reports that two former hostages in Syria, journalists Nicolas Henin and Didier François, had identified Nemmouche as one of their captors when they were being held by jihadists in Syria.
Daily Liberation cited evidence from the former hostages revealing that the man had planned “at least one attack in France, in the heart of Paris, which would be at least five times bigger than the attacks in Toulouse,” a reference to Mohammed Merah, who launched a series of terorist attacks against a Jewish school in Toulouse and French military targets in the southern French city of Toulouse in 2012.
The attack would allegedly have taken place on Paris’s iconic Champs Elysees Avenue on July 14, the French national holiday.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the story was “untrue”. The Paris prosecutor issued a statement on Monday saying that no information on a planned Paris attack had yet featured in the charges against Nemmouche.
But Liberation stuck resolutely to its claims, insisting that the freed hostages, in an April 20 briefing with the French intelligence services, warned that their former captor – then unnamed – had threatened to attack Paris on Bastille Day on July 14.
Didier François told a French radio:’’Throughout our detention there was an anti-Semitic obsession from Nemmouche, he wanted to replicate or outdo Merah, who was a sort of model for him.”
The former hostage also said that Nemmouche described himself as “a young criminal who had been transformed into an ethnic cleanser”.
Nemmouche was arrested by chance as he got off a bus from Brussels to Marseille on May 30.
He was found carrying an AK-47 assault rifle with 261 rounds of ammunition, a handgun with 57 bullets and a banner inscribed with words dedicated to the Islamic State organisation.
Four people were killed in the attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels: a couple of Israeli tourists, a Frenchwoman who worked as a volunteer and a Belgian museum employee. The attack underscored fears of terrorist attacks launched by European jihadists returning from Syria.
French authorities say that some 900 French nationals are believed to be fighting alongside jihadists in Syria