French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Thursday that five terror attacks had been "foiled" in France in recent months.

He told radio station France Inter that "numerous attacks had already been foiled - five if you take into account the attack that happily did not take place at Villejuif" on the outskirts of Paris.

A 24-year-old Franco-Algerian IT student, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, is being held by police investigating a suspected plot to attack a church near the French capital.

"The threat has never been as high. We have never had to face this kind of terrorism in our history," Valls told France Inter.

Hundreds of French nationals have joined jihadist ranks in Iraq and Syria, accounting for almost half the European fighters there, according to a report released this month by the upper house Senate.

Valls said 1,573 French citizens or residents had been implicated in "terror networks", 442 of which were believed to be in Syria.

(China Daily 04/24/2015 page12)