French Police Raid An Alleged Far-Left Bomb Factory HQ

French police in the Paris suburb of Bagnolet have arrested four people after discovering the alleged headquarters of the city’s far-left extremist Antifa movement, where it is claimed explosives were being manufactured.

The raid of the building took place on Sunday with officers discovering dozens of Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices. The building, which has been occupied by members of the far-left extremist movement, featured various radical slogans including: “A cop, a bullet, social justice.”

Among the four arrested were a 30-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman with the former being previously known to police for acts of violence. The other two extremists were arrested the day before and were found to have explosives and Molotov cocktails.

All four are set to be charged with “participation in a group with a view to committing violence and making explosive devices” and will be kept in pre-trial detention.

The raid is not the first time an Antifa bomb-making factory has been discovered in Europe. Police in the German city of  Thuringia made a similar discovery in 2018, with one of the suspects being directly linked to a Left Party politician.

Bombs have been used by far-left extremists in Italy as recently as August 2018 when a bomb was detonated outside the local party headquarters of Matteo Salvini’s League in the city of Treviso. Several months later, a notorious far-left Spanish anarchist was arrested in connection with the blast.

In the last several weeks, Antifa extremists were also believed to be behind several acts of sabotage of French communications infrastructure across the country. On Monday, Antifa extremists took credit for a number of attacks on relay towers in the Grenoble region.