Authorities have foiled 65 terrorist plots in France since 2015, according to official figures which also revealed that terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of over 260 people during the same time period.
Sixty of the foiled terrorist attacks have involved suspects who were motivated by radical Islamic extremism, while an additional five are thought to have been motived by far-right extremism.
However, all 263 lives lost to terrorism since 2015 were caused by Islamist attacks, with 21 incidents in total.
The figures, which were reported by the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme this week, claim that the vast majority of those involved in foiled, failed, or successful terrorist plots — four out of five individuals — were born in France. Just 34 were foreigners, mainly from North Africa until 2018, and since then, mostly migrants from Russia and Syria.
Last year, a Syrian refugee was one of seven individuals arrested in Brest by police who suspected the group of plotting a terrorist attack.
Among terrorist attacks actually carried out in France, the most deadly, the 2015 November Bataclan massacre, involved several foreign nationals who had come to France disguising themselves as asylum seekers or had come from neighbouring Belgium, such as Salah Abdeslam who is currently on trial in connection to the attacks.
The last surviving attacker of the Bataclan massacre, Abdeslam stated at a court appearance in September that terrorists and jihadists were “authentic Muslims” and told the families of the victims the attack was “nothing personal”.
The Nice church attacker Brahim Aouissaoui was a Tunisian national who illegally entered Italy by boat before travelling to France where he killed three people at the Nice Basilica with a knife. Later reports claimed that his initial target for an attack had been Paris but he was unable to afford a train ticket.
According to Le Télégramme, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism remains high in France and those who carry out attacks are increasingly revealed to be previously unknown to security services and police.
France’s terrorism watchlists have thousands of names recorded on them, such as the Terrorist Radicalisation Prevention Report Index (FSRPT), which has over 1,000 illegal immigrants on it, alone, France’s Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin revealed in May.