Four people, including a 16-year-old girl, have been arrested in Montpelier, in southern France, on suspicion that they were planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Paris. 

"An attack has been foiled," a police source told the AFP news agency, adding that the four were arrested after buying acetone, a highly flammable liquid that can be used to make bombs. 

The other suspects were aged 20, 26 and 33, the source said. 

"It seems that they intended to go through with it and to make several explosive devices," the source said. 

French media reports said that the suspects were planning to detonate an explosives belt in a tourist area in Paris. 

The arrests come one week after an attack outside the famed Louvre Museum in Paris in which a man, believed to be an Egyptian national, lunged at four soldiers brandishing two machetes shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest"). 

President Francois Hollande said that "there is little doubt as to the terrorist nature of this act". 

The attack was the latest in a string of assaults in France and thrust the issue of security back into the headlines three months ahead of the presidential election. 

Over the past two years, France has suffered a string of bloody attacks by Islamic extremists that has claimed more than 200 lives. The country has been under a state of emergency since November 2015. 

Security, immigration and the economy are all major issues for voters ahead of this year's presidential and parliamentary elections which are expected to confirm the country's shift to the right after five years of Socialist rule.--i24

Source :NNA