Egyptian brothers arrested in foiled terror attack in France

Two brothers of Egyptian origin were arrested when French police foiled a suspected terror attack, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said on Friday.

"There were two young people of Egyptian origin who were preparing to commit an attack, with either explosives or ricin, this very powerful poison," the minister said on BFMTV.

"They had tutorials that showed how to make ricin-based poisons," Collomb said, adding that they had communicated via the Telecom encrypted messaging app.

The revelation came after a 29-year-old man was killed and five other people injured in a deadly knife attack in Paris last Saturday night.

Collomb did not indicate when they were arrested, but a source close to the inquiry said they were detained in the northern 18th Arrondissement of Paris on May 11, the day before Khamzat Azimov carried out his knife rampage.

One of the men "admitted having wanted to stage an attack," the source told AFP.

Azimov also lived in the 18th Arrondissement, parts of which are packed with low-income high-rises and a mix of French and immigrant communities.

In late March, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe had indicated that a total of 51 attacks had been thwarted by French security services since January 2015, the beginning of a wave of strikes on French soil, many claimed by the Islamic State group.

A total of 246 people have been killed in attacks since then.

Terror funding

Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that militants "use all contemporary forms of financing" in an address at the closing of a two-day conference on combating the funding of terror groups at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which brought together around 80 ministers and 500 experts.

"We have to cut off terrorism at its roots: it feeds on human trafficking, drugs and weapons. There's always an underlying economy," said Macron, urging global "transparency and mobilisation."

"We have to cross to a new stage in the fight against Daesh and al-Qaeda,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State militant group.

A French presidential official briefing journalists ahead of the terror funding conference this week said that IS income was estimated at about one billion dollars (820 million euros) a year between 2014-2016.

Most of this was from local taxation, oil revenues and looting, with far smaller amounts flowing in from overseas donors. 

IS swept across large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a cross-border "caliphate" in areas they controlled.

Syrian and Iraqi forces have since driven IS from nearly all the territory it once held, except for a small presence in the remote desert areas along the border.

But French officials are concerned that the money has been transferred out of Syria and Iraq and could be used to rebuild the organisation. 

"It has been moved since, at least in part. It's probably somewhere," the official said on condition of anonymity. "These groups are very skilful in using sophisticated techniques to move financial resources around."