France on Wednesday charged* the main suspect in a foiled attack plot, who was found with an arsenal of weapons and explosives at his home, with membership of a terrorist organisation, reports Yahoo! News.
The move comes as investigators step up efforts to smash a tangled web of Islamic State-linked extremists blamed for both the November Paris attacks and last week's suicide bombings on Brussels airport and metro that killed 32 people.
French national Reda Kriket, 34, was arrested near Paris last week and a police raid on his apartment netted a cache of assault rifles, handguns and TATP, the highly volatile homemade explosive favoured by IS jihadists.
State prosecutor François Molins said Wednesday that "no specific target" had been identified for the foiled attack but that the cache of weapons showed an imminent act of "extreme violence" had likely been prevented.
Kriket's arrest came just four months after the jihadist carnage that claimed 130 lives in Paris.
He had rented the apartment in the suburb of Argenteuil under a false identity last summer, the prosecutor said.
Another French suspect, 32-year-old Anis Bahri, was arrested in Rotterdam in the Netherlands on Sunday in connection with the new Paris plot and is fighting extradition to France.
Both Kriket and Bahri are believed to have travelled to Syria in late 2014 or early 2015, and since then between France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the French prosecutor said.
Read more of this report from Yahoo! News.
* Editor's note: Under a change to the French legal system introduced in 1993, a magistrate can decide a suspect should be 'placed under investigation' (mise en examen), which is a status one step short of being charged (inculpé), if there is 'serious or concordant' evidence that they committed a crime. Some English-language media describe this status, peculiar to French criminal law, as that of being charged. In fact, it is only at the end of an investigation that a decision can be made to bring charges, in which case the accused is automatically sent for trial.