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| - Seven suspected members of a French terror cell arrested after a massive weapons haul on the eve of the Euro 2016 football tournament went on trial on Monday in Paris. In March 2016, police discovered several AK-47 assault rifles, handguns, explosives and bomb-making equipment in an apartment in a Paris suburb rented by Reda Kriket, a convicted Islamist radical. The weapons cache included TATP, the explosive that was used during deadly attacks in Paris in November 2015 and again in Brussels a few days before the raid, fuelling suspicion that a large-scale assault had been thwarted. Then prime minister Manuel Valls said he believed that 39-year-old Kriket had been planning to target the Euro 2016 competition, which was held in cities across France in June-July 2016. But a five-year investigation failed to determine the exact target of the suspected plot. A few days after Kriket's arrest in France, Dutch police arrested another suspect, 37-year-old self-described jihadist Anis Bahri, in Rotterdam. Investigators believe that Kriket, Bahri and a third man whose DNA was found in the apartment used to store weapons, Algerian national Abderrahmane Ameuroud, were planning to carry out an attack in the name of the Islamic State group. Four other men aged between 38 and 44 are accused of playing smaller roles in the alleged plot. Kriket, a serial offender with convictions for a string of armed robberies, has denied planning a terror attack, telling investigators he had intended to sell the weapons. Both he and Bahri are believed to have travelled to Syria in late 2014 or early 2015. In July 2015, Kriket was sentenced in absentia to 10 years imprisonment in Belgium over his suspected involvement in a jihadist network supplying fighters to Syria. One of his co-accused in that trial was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, who was killed in a shootout with French police. The only surviving member of the group of jihadists who massacred 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall and other venues around Paris, Salah Abdeslam, is set to go on trial in September. asl/cb/jh/wai
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