Man charged in France for planning terror attack

22 January 2018: French authorities on Saturday charged a 33-year-old man, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State Group in a video, with planning a terror attack, judicial sources said.

The man, who was not known to police, was arrested near the southern city of Nimes on Tuesday. Bomb making materials were found in his house but there was no indication of the targets he was planning to attack, they said.

"This is the first attack foiled this year," a source close to the investigation told AFP.

The man was charged with "associating with terrorist criminals" and placed in custody.

"The investigation started when police saw on social media an attempt by a man in the Nimes region with Islamist leanings trying to procure a weapon," the source close to the investigation said.

The raid on the man's house yielded a tube filled with powder which could likely be used as an explosive, different powders and a device to start a fire, the source said.

Several videos taken last year were seized including one in which the man pledges allegiance to self-proclaimed IS "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with the organisation's black flag in the background.

The IS claimed two attacks in France last year -- the April 20 shooting of a policeman on Paris's emblematic Champs Elysees and an October 1 attack in Marseilles's railway station that killed two people.

Jihadist attacks have claimed 241 lives in France since the start of 2015.