TerrorismCar filled with gas cylinders near Notre Dame cathedral part of a terror plot

The French security services are looking for a young woman after a car carrying seven gas cylinders was discovered Saturday parking near Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris.

The car was found on a Seine riverside stretch called the Quai de Montebello, only meters from the cathedral.

Le Monde reports that the police arrested a couple, aged 34 and 29, on a motorway in southern France in connection with the incident..

The car owner was already on the French intelligence services’ terrorist watch list. He was released shortly after being arrested because he had approached the police on Sunday to report that his daughter had disappeared with his car.

His daughter, 19, who is being sought by the police, was known to police after expressing her desire to go to Syria to join ISIS.

Agence France-Presse reports that the car owner told investigators that his daughter was radicalized.

Le Mondenotes that the Peugeot 607, with its registration plates removed, contained seven gas cylinders, one of them empty. There was no detonating device in the car. The police said that the car’s hazard lights were flashing, probably to attract attention.

On the back seat the police found several documents written in Arabic.

Florence Berthout, the mayor of Paris’s fifth arrondissement (or district), told Le Monde that the incident highlighted the need to bolster security and put more police on patrol on the city streets.

She said the vehicle was left in a zone where parking is strictly prohibited and that it had remained there for around two hours before it came to the attention of police. “Police and army staffing must be stepped up,” she told the news TV channel BFM.