French investigators are checking again for security flaws at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport after Thursday's EgyptAir crash, despite already stripping hundreds of employees of their security clearance since last year's jihadist attacks.

It is still far from clear whether the EgyptAir plane that crashed en route from Paris to Cairo was the victim of a terrorist attack or that any security lapse happened on French soil.

One of the three suicide attackers at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris last November was buried on Friday in eastern France, said a source close to the investigation.

Foued Mohamed-Aggad, who was 23 when he died, was buried before dawn in a Muslim part of the Wissembourg cemetery in northern Alsace, the source said.

Four French gendarmes were killed Friday when a helicopter crashed in a mountainous area of southwest France Friday, the force said.

The helicopter crashed into a cliff face in the area around Cauterets in the Hautes-Pyrenees region, killing all four people aboard, the force said.

France was disrupted by a third straight day of mass strikes and demonstrations on Thursday as the prime minister called for protesters who torched a police car to face "harsh" punishment.

Dozens of flights and trains were canceled as rail staff and air traffic controllers walked off the job in the latest mass protests against the government's labor market reforms.

Police on Wednesday staged demonstrations across France against a surge of "anti-cop hatred" which they say they have suffered at a series of anti-government protests in recent months.

But the demonstrations sparked a violent counter-protest in Paris, where a police car was attacked and set alight as some 300 protesters defied a ban to march through the streets chanting "Cops, pigs, killers!"

French police said Tuesday they have broken up a smuggling network that used yachts to transport migrants to Britain after finding seven Ukrainians stowed away on a boat on the French coast.

Two skippers and three suspected smugglers were detained on Friday after police discovered the migrants on their sailboat in Brittany on France's northwest coast.

French Ambassador to Lebanon Emmanuel Bonne denied on Tuesday media reports that said that Paris was planning on holding an international conference to resolve Lebanon's political crisis, reported LBCI television.

He told the station that a “misunderstanding” had occurred over the issue.

Head of the Mustaqbal Movement MP Saad Hariri warned on Tuesday of the dangerous impact the ongoing presidential vacuum is having on Lebanon.

He said after holding talks with French President Francois Hollande: “The French president is very keen on ending the vacuum.”

A top Israeli official on Friday reiterated the country's opposition to a French attempt to resurrect the peace process with the Palestinians, ahead of a visit by France's foreign minister.

Paris will hold an international ministerial meeting on May 30 to try to revive peace talks that have been frozen since a U.S.-brokered initiative collapsed in April 2014.

France's Finance Minister Michel Sapin has admitted he acted inappropriately towards a female journalist following claims he twanged her knicker elastic -- backtracking after categorically denying the incident just a few hours earlier.

Sapin's admission late Tuesday came in the wake of a scandal which broke the previous day when eight women accused a deputy parliamentary speaker, Denis Baupin, of long-running sexual harassment.