The 21-year-old was detained Monday in the area of Toulouse, a city 500 miles south of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray where the attack took place in late July, a spokeswoman for France's antiterror prosecutor said on Saturday.

The prosecutor filed preliminary charges on Friday and ordered the man to remain in detention during the investigation, she said. Read more

The chief executive of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Andrew Kibblewhite, said members of the group had been selected for their areas of expertise.

"They're a group of free thinkers who between them cover the big risk areas."

The members of the group are:

• Ian Fletcher - head of the Government Communications Security Bureau
• Sir Peter Gluckman - PM's chief science adviser
• Therese Walsh - chief executive of the 2015 Cricket World Cup
• Karen Poutasi - chief executive of NZQA
• Keith Turner - chairman of Fisher and Paykel
• Richard Forgan - consulting partner at PWC
• Hugh Cowan - Earthquake Commission executive
• Lt Gen Rhys Jones - former Chief of Defence Force
• Helen Anderson - director of Dairy NZ, Niwa and Branz
• Murray Sherwin - chairman of the Productivity Commission
• Led by GCSB boss Ian Fletcher, the group of 10 have been drawn from public and private life to find weaknesses in New Zealand's armour.

Papers released to the Herald through the Official Information Act show the advisory group was formed as part of a streamlining process and to help "in anticipating and mitigating strategic national security risks".

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Image: Screenshot TNVZ

Religious and political conservatives have for some years sought to connect Islam to violence, and the premature portrayal of the terror attacks as the work of Muslims has left some conservatives 'red-faced.'

Mark Juergensmeyer, author "Terror in the Mind of God," noted close parallels between the 32-year-old Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik, who killed at least 76 people in coordinated attacks on government buildings in Oslo and a youth rally at a nearby island, and Timothy McVeigh, the anti-government radical behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

"If [Osama] bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones," Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote on the blog Religion Dispatches.

Perhaps the best lesson - for conservatives and everyone else looking for obvious culprits and easy answers - came from a Norwegian woman who visited the devastation in Oslo.

"If Islamic people do something bad, you think, 'Oh, it's Muslims'?" Sigrid Skeie Tjensvoll told The Washington Post. "But if a white Protestant does something bad, you just think he's mad. That's something we need to think about."

In his manifesto, written just hours before the killings, Breivik quoted Sydney Archbishop, Cardinal George Pell as a source of his 'Christian' motivation.

Quoting a speech Pell gave post September 11, Breivik wrote, "in the relationship between the Islamic and non-Islamic world, the normal thing is a situation of tension if not war, or outright hostility".

Sources

• Huffington Post
• SMH
• Religion Dispatches