The French national charged Wednesday with plotting a terrorist attack had an arsenal in his apartment.
In the apartment Reda Kriket rented in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, police found some of the standard tools of terror — a cache of assault rifles and handguns, five stolen French passports, seven cell phones still in their packaging, and a single tear gas bomb, prosecutors said.
They also confiscated Tupperware containing 500 grams of the powerful explosive TATP, more than a kilo of industrial explosives, detonators and other electronics, they said.
More ominously, they found acetone and other chemicals, along with four cartons containing thousands of steel marbles — the killer ingredients in the kinds of deadly shrapnel-filled bombs favored by Islamic State terrorists.
And, prosecutors said, they found a book to help whip-up a calamity entitled “The Modern Laboratory."
"Everything suggests that the discovery of this cache avoided a act of extreme violence by a terrorist network," said Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who did not identify a particular target.
Kriket was arrested on Thursday as part of the drive to root-out and destroy the ISIS-linked extremists blamed for last week's bombings of the Brussels airport and metro that killed 32 people — and the deadly Paris terror attacks in November that left 130 dead.
Kriket, 34, is believed to have been in cahoots with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the 27-year-old ringleader of the Paris massacre who was killed five days later in a shootout with Paris police.
The Belgians had convicted both men in absentia last summer for being part of a recruiting network for jihad in Syria, the Associated Press reported.
NBC News, citing sources, reported last week the Brussels bombers used ammonium nitrate bombs and that each were estimated at 44 pounds each.
In a raid on a residence used by the suspected terrorists, police also found more than 30 pounds of TATP along with 150 liters of acetone and 30 liters of hydrogen peroxide.
