The 30-year-old was arrested last week in the city of Angers at a local post office while attempting to pick up the firearm sent to him from the United States, Le Parisien reported.
According to public prosecutor Yves Gambert, the man was indicted on charges of importing category A weapons.
Mario Nadir, the former inmate, was arrested by the customs when he was picking up his package from the United States and remanded in police custody for 96 hours, reported Ouest France.
Nadir is suspected of Islamic radicalism. He was sentenced to prison for armed violence by the High Court of Maine-et-Loire, in 2010 already. He lost his appeal in 2011.
The suspect served a seven-year sentence in 2010 for armed violence directed at a police officer and while in prison, he converted to Islam. He was examined by the domestic intelligence services in 2016 following the Bataclan massacre in November of 2015.
The disturbing profile of Mario Nadir spiked fears of yet another possible terror attack. But on Monday, the prosecutor’s office for counterterrorism had not yet intervened.
Nadir is also alleged to have met Islamist David Pagerie who has been convicted of viewing multiple Islamic jihadist sites in 2016. In September 2016, Pagerie also from Angers, was sentenced to two years in jail after police discovered during a raid that Pagerie was regularly consulting ISIS websites.
The top French constitutional authority, the Constitutional Council had scrapped proposed legislation in 2017 to criminalize visiting terrorist websites.
Pagerie was previously on the notorious fiche S list, the designation used for monitoring potential terrorists. The court later replaced his jail term with house arrest.
ISIS was able to coordinate and plan a terror attack with inmates in the Fresnes prison in 2017. Their terror plot was foiled by the Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI) domestic intelligence agency.
In August 2017, police in the Paris migrant-heavy district of Seine-Saint-Denis found a cache of firearms that included an anti-tank rocket launcher, high-powered explosives, sawn-off shotguns, and police gear.
In Eure-et-Loir, Eure, and Yvelines police raids in the same year, uncovered fully automatic rifles and another anti-tank rocket launcher.
“The investigators seized seven weapons of war, including two loaded and ready-to-run M80 rocket launchers capable of destroying a tank, two Kalashnikovs, one Spanish assault rifle, two machine guns,” public prosecutor Rémi Coutin said at the time.