PARIS - French authorities said yesterday that a string of recent arrests in the Paris suburbs had thwarted a plan by Islamic militants to blow up the Russian Embassy, on the edge of the city.

"This cell had decided to hit Russian targets in France," said an Interior Ministry statement released yesterday.

The statement said that the group's motive was to avenge the death of several people who had died in Chechnya, including an Arab-born Chechen field commander known as Khattab, who was reported to have been killed last March, and another man called Moutana, who had been implicated in a plan to blow up the cathedral in Strasbourg, France, and was later killed in Chechnya.

Whether any of the members were Chechens was not clear.

Attacks linked to Chechnya's separatist movement have plagued Russia for decades, including the one yesterday at the local government headquarters in Grozny, the Chechen capital.

Police feared an attack

France's antiterrorism police have been on heightened alert for months, fearing an attack that was believed to be linked to al-Qaida.

In September, French police discovered plastic explosives on an airplane that had arrived from Morocco.

More than two dozen people have been detained in the past month because of possible terrorist links, though many have subsequently been released.

But the French Interior Ministry announced yesterday that nine people picked up by the country's antiterrorism police since a raid last week were part of a cell with ties to separatists in the Russian territory of Chechnya and to al-Qaida.

Four of the nine were arrested on Dec. 16 in La Courneuve, a suburb north of Paris. The three men and one woman are of North African origin.

The ministry said that one of the four, identified as Merouane Benahmed, is a former leader of the Armed Islamic Group, Algeria's most violent Islamist movement, and that he is an expert in electronics and making bombs. Empty butane gas containers, remote-control detonators and a chemical warfare suit were found among their belongings.

A fifth man with ties to the group, Nourredine Merabet, was arrested five days later on the French-Spanish border.

The officials said that four people were arrested Tuesday in Romainville, another Paris suburb not far from Courneuve.

List of chemicals found

Those arrested included a Frenchman named Menad Benchellali, whose brother was captured by American troops in Afghanistan and is being held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Another of the four is a trained chemist who had spent time in Afghanistan.

Officials said that among the discoveries in Romainville was a list of chemicals needed to make explosives and a cyanide-like gas, together with required quantities and prices.

Benahmed, Benchellali and Merabet trained in militants' camps in the Caucasus Mountains along Chechnya's border with Georgia, the ministry said, where they met senior members of al-Qaida who were specialists in toxic materials.

"At this stage of the inquiry, we can say that the operational group in France has been dismantled and the project they were preparing has been prevented," the ministry statement said.