French Legislators Urge Intel Overhaul After Paris Attacks

Intelligence failures, in France and overseas, led to the failure to foil attacks in Paris previous year by Islamic radicals that killed 147 people, while rival units of security forces trapped by rules and stepping on each other’s feet made the situation worse during the attacks, the head of an investigating commission of lawmakers concluded Tuesday.

Conservative politician Georges Fenech, who headed the investigation commission, said all the attackers involved in the 2015 violence had been known to authorities.

Mr Fenech recommended a national counter terrorism agency be set up like the one created in America after the events of 11 September, as well as better European intelligence cooperation.

French lawmakers have recommended sweeping changes to the country’s intelligence services in response to mounting concerns over the dangers posed by global terrorism.

The inquiry was prompted largely by attacks on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket elsewhere in the Paris area in January 2015 that left 17 people dead, and by a coordinated series of assaults in and around the city in November in which Islamic State militants killed 130 people.

But it also criticised the Belgian authorities for failures over the fugitive Salah Abdeslam, a key figure in the November attacks who was stopped at the French border with Belgium the next day but released because the Belgians had not provided information about his links to militancy.

But intelligence analysts here were uncertain as to the actual impact another intelligence agency would have, even a more unified one.

This is why we are proposing a national anti-terrorist agency. “What we need more than the centralization and specialization of our intelligence is the capability to detect very early the stages and signs of radicalization at the local level”.

The first of the centers is slated to open by the end of the summer, according to the French Interior Ministry.

In the most murderous operations, separate groups of terrorists or individuals carried out a spate of shootings and bombings in central Paris and near the main football stadium, Stade de France, where President Francois Hollande was watching a soccer game between France and Germany.

The inquiry concluded that though some of the gunmen who killed 90 people in the Bataclan attack could have been arrested, there was little possibility of identifying the concert hall in advance as a target. The tournament ends Sunday.