French authorities last week arrested a 27-year-old man from Tunisia, whom they suspect of planning a terrorist attack against a museum and on French Jews, Le Figaro reported on Monday.
According to the report, the man, identified in the media as Dhafer M., migrated illegally to France in 2022 from the island of Djerba, which houses the oldest synagogue in Africa and is one of a handful of locales in North Africa with a permanent Jewish community.
He had also planned to join the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria or in Mozambique, according to the report. Police found videos of jihadist propaganda and hundreds of photos of weapons on his cell phone. Police apprehended him after observing him patrolling certain areas of Paris, and he presented them with a falsified driver’s license, the report said.
France’s National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), established in 2019 after a string of deadly attacks, said in its 2025 report that it receives a new case approximately every week, with 67 cases handled that year. This tally was a record. In 2024, the anti-terrorism task force investigated 51 cases of jihadism since January 2025.
Officials warned of growing numbers of radicalized “child soldiers” participating in “Islamist-inspired crimes and offenses.”
