Arrested baggage handler may have been planning robbery at airport

French police have been unable to discover the motive of the baggage handler arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport after his car was found to contain a "ready-for-use" bomb kit and two firearms.

Abderazak Besseghir, 27, had remained "virtually silent" and claimed not to understand the reason for his arrest, they said.

Mr Besseghir, a Muslim born in France of Algerian parents, had no known link with terrorist or Islamic fundamentalist groups and his only criminal conviction was for vandalism in 1997. A police spokesman said they were "seriously considering" a terrorism motive but they had not ruled out the possibility that the bomb kit and arms – including an automatic handgun, a machine-gun, five cakes of explosives, a slow-burning fuse and two detonators – were intended for a cash-in-transit robbery at the airport.

Mr Besseghir is understood to have been arrested as he was returning to his car at the end of his shift on Saturday evening. Police deny he had been under surveillance. Two versions of his arrest are circulating –that a "passing soldier" saw him handle a firearm in the car park or that a passenger saw a gun on the back seat of his car. His father, two brothers and a family friend are also being questioned by the anti-terrorism squad. Neighbours in the Parisian suburb of Bondy said police raided the Besseghir family home on Saturday night. Two or three objects that could be of an Islamist nature were seized, police said.

They also searched the home of one of Abderazak Besseghir's former girlfriends. The arrests, which were only made public early yesterday, come amid a clampdown that began on 16 December when the French Interior Ministry said it had information indicating "one or several terrorist attacks" were being planned for the festive season. One thousand extra police and military have been deployed in cities and tourist centres. Nine other men of North African origin have been arrested in connection with an investigation into links between Islamic militants in Europe and Chechnya.

Mr Besseghir had access to restricted areas at Charles de Gaulle, which handles 100,000 passengers a day. The British "shoe bomber", Richard Reid, who had explosives in his trainers, boarded an American Airlines flight for Miami there a year ago.

An investigation at the airport earlier this year found that security was poor. Last month 200 security passes were withdrawn from staff who were alleged to have Islamist links.

Mr Besseghir and the other four can be held until Wednesday evening without being put under formal investigation.

* The FBI is searching for several men of Arab ancestry who crossed illegally into the United States from Canada and may have links to others being watched in terrorism investigations, officials said yesterday.