Alexandre was arrested outside the home of a friend close to Les Yvelines, near Paris, where he had been staying because he has no permanent address, Molins said.

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His base in Yvelines, a suburb of Paris, was an industrial-sized site incorporating a school where, on any day, 400 working chefs would be retraining in every branch of cookery.

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Widad, a 25-year-old secretary of Algerian origin, notes that when she was a schoolchild in Les Yvelines, in the Paris suburbs, four-fifths of her class were North African and only a handful went on to study for the baccalaureate, the school-leaving certificate that is the essential passport to a university or a reasonable job.

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