French police who arrested an airport baggage handler accused of having guns and explosives hidden in his car said today they had also arrested a witness who alerted them to the suspect vehicle.
Officers found an automatic pistol, a machine pistol, five cakes of plastic explosive, two detonators and a safety fuse in the boot of the car at Paris's main international airport, Roissy Charles de Gaulle.
Police arrested the car's owner, Mr Abderazak Besseghir, a 27-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin on Saturday. He remains in police custody pending questioning by an investigating magistrate.
Now police want to verify the account of the witness, an ex-soldier initially identified as a passenger, who told officers he saw the man moving items in the boot of the vehicle parked at the airport and heard strange noises.
"Investigators are trying to check the credibility and the veracity of his statements, in addition to establishing his personality profile," a police official said.
Mr Besseghir, who has no prior criminal record and no known links to Islamist radical movements, told police investigators somebody else must have put the arms and explosives in his car, a source close to the inquiry said yesterday.
His father, two brothers and a friend are also being held by anti-terrorist police who said they were widening their inquiry to other people in Mr Besseghir's circle and at the airport to establish whether or not a hijack attempt was being planned.
The arrests follow a round-up of suspected Islamist militants in and around Paris this month. Fears of a terror attack are high after the Interior Ministry said on December 20th that at least one attack was being planned in the near future.