Excerpt:
Last February, French authorities broke up a terrorist plot they described as "imminent," seizing nine hundred grams of explosives from the apartment building of a twenty-three year-old Islamist recently returned from Syria where he was suspected of having waged jihad. Two men escaped the police raid, in which several wills were also found, one belonging to a 25-year-old man described as "a candidate for the jihad."
"This case is emblematic of that which one has always feared," a police source close to the investigation told the French newspaper, Le Figaro, at the time, explaining that young French Muslims who had participated in the Syrian jihad and returned "radical, trained, hardened" with a terrorist project in mind are France's newest terrorist threat.
This fear became a reality for French authorities when Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, a French Muslim and veteran jihadist of the Syrian war, was arrested Friday in southern France "in possession of firearms and large quantities of ammunition." Nemmouche is suspected of having killed three people in a shooting rampage in Brussel's Jewish museum on May 24. After the arrest, police apparently found a video he made, claiming responsibility for the attack.