RadicalizationFrench girl, 16, to face charges for plotting a terrorist attack

A judge in France has agreed with the prosecution that a 16-year-old French girl should face preliminary terrorism charges for supporting ISIS and trying to plot a terrorist attack.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday that the girl was using an encrypted social media app to spread calls by ISIS to the organization’s followers in France to commit violent acts.

The BBC reports that the judge charged the teenager with taking part in a “criminal terrorist association” and “inciting to commit terrorist acts through an online communication medium.”

She has been taken into custody.

The French police say the girl was “extremely radicalized” and that she served as the administrator of a chat group dedicated to ISIS propaganda on the Telegram app, an end-to-end encrypted messaging app which jihadists use to communicate. Deputy prosecutor Laure Vermeersch said no specific targets for terrorist attacks had been mentioned by the teenager, who had no prior criminal history.

Her name was not released.

Police investigators are now searching for other participants of the chat group, looking for possible accomplices in the girl’s attack plot.

The girl was arrested last Thursday in the Melun suburb south of Paris. The BBC notes that it is not the first time a girl has been detained by the French security services for suspicion of trying to commit a terrorist attack. In March, two girls aged 15 and 17 were formally charged with taking part in a criminal terrorist association for plotting to attack a target – possibly a Paris concert hall – in a manner similar to the attack on the Paris Bataclan concert hall in November 2015. Investigators say the plot by the girls was not in an advanced stage.