Frenchmen yells at the city mayor of Romain Colas over the upcoming war against Muslims

French police have dismantled an Islamist female cell suspected of plotting terror attacks, including an attempt to blow up a car near Notre-Dame cathedral in central Paris.

As of Friday, French authorities had detained five women, aged between 16 and 39, and a man, in connection with suspected terrorist activities, Paris prosecutor François Molins said.

The arrests mark the first time that women have been identified as suspected perpetrators of jihadi attacks in France.

In the wake of the suicide attacks that killed 130 in Paris and the suburb of Saint Denis in November, intelligence experts had expected female attackers to play a bigger role in France itself, since the country provides the largest contingent of Isis’s female recruits.

Most of the suspects arrested in recent days were known to police because they had been flagged as radicalised. One of them, Sarah H., 23, had direct links with Larossi Abballa, a 25-year-old French citizen who stabbed a 42-year-old police officer and his partner to death in June outside Paris.

Bernard Cazeneuve, interior minister, described the suspects as “radicalised, fanatical” and said that they were “probably preparing new violent and imminent acts” when three of them were arrested on Thursday evening in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, a suburb south-east of Paris.