The honorary President of the French far-right National Front party has suggested that the shooting of Charlie Hebdo’s staff was the work of an “intelligence agency” to foment a civil war.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, 86, the founder of the far-right party which hopes to win the French presidency in 2017, drew specific attention to the intelligence services of France, the United States and Israel, reported Komsomolskaïa Pravda, which interviewed Le Pen.

However his claims, echoing conspiracy theories proliferating on the internet, angered his daughter Marine, who replaced him at the head of the party three years ago.

“The shooting at Charlie Hebdo resembles a secret service operation but we have no proof of that,” the newspaper quoted Mr Le Pen as saying. “I don’t think it was organized by the French authorities but they permitted this crime to be committed.  That, for the moment, is just a supposition.”

Le Pen in part based his claims on the fact that one of the attackers left his identity card in the car. He compared this so-called “miraculous fact” to the fact that one of the passport of the 9/11 attackers was found on the ground in New York after the planes crashed in the Twin Towers.

One day later, in an interview with Le Monde, Le Pen said he could not remember talking about secret services to the Russian outlet, but repeated his suspicions about the identity card.

Officially, however, the National Front and its formal leader Marine Le Pen attributed the attack’s responsibility to the “interior enemy,” a phrase she used against Muslim immigrants.

This is not the first time the party’s founder has contradicted his daughter, who is attempted a slightly more moderate line in order to win over wider section of the population to boost her presidency bid. However some claim these apparant divisions allow the party to rally both extremist and more moderate sectors of the far-right in France.