French intelligence agents arrested three suspected members of an Islamist terror cell on Tuesday, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said, a day after six others were held in an anti-terror swoop, the AFP news agency reported.

The latest arrests in the south of the country targeted “three individuals known for their jihadism who were being tracked,” Valls said. A source close to the investigation said they included a couple and a man.

They were suspected of involvement in financing a network that sent militants abroad.

Valls said the six people arrested on Monday in the Paris region “were particularly dangerous and probably involved in a hold-up”.

The suspects, aged between 22 and 38, include one man from Benin, another from the Comoros and four French nationals, a source close to the case said.

The source added investigators believe “they were planning to commit terrorist acts targeting well-known figures in France”.

Last October French police dismantled another Islamist cell suspected of carrying out a grenade attack on a Jewish grocery store in a Paris suburb the previous month.

A French prosecutor branded that homegrown group of Islamist extremists as the biggest terror threat the country had faced since the Algerian-based GIA carried out a string of deadly bombings in the 1990s.

In May, Valls warned of a “global terrorist threat,” stressing that France was among the countries facing that threat, from both within and outside its borders.

“There is no longer a hermetic border between the interior and the exterior, the enemies within and those outside share in the global combat, to do harm to democracies in the name of radical Islamism,” he said, according to AFP.