January 11, 2015
The bloody denouement on Friday of two hostage crises at different ends of a traumatised Paris means attention will now shift to the gaping question facing the French government: how did several jihadists — and possibly a larger cell of co-conspirators — manage to evade surveillance and execute a bold attack despite being well known to the country’s police and intelligence services?
On its own, the Wednesday morning slaughter that left 12 people dead at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo represented a major breakdown for French security and intelligence forces, especially after the authorities confirmed that the two suspects, the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, had known links to the militant group Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Then on Friday, even as the police had cornered the Kouachi brothers inside a printing factory in the northeast suburbs, another militant, Amedy Coulibaly —who has since been linked to the Kouachis — stormed a kosher supermarket in Paris and threatened to kill hostages if the police captured the Kouachis.
“There is a clear failing,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said. “When 17 people die, it means there were cracks.”
An American official said that French intelligence and law enforcement agencies had conducted surveillance on one or both of the Kouachi brothers after Saïd returned from Yemen two years ago, but later reduced that monitoring or dropped it altogether to focus on what were believed to be bigger threats.
“These guys were known to be bad, and the French had tabs on them for a while,” said the official. “At some point, though, they allocated resources differently. They moved on to other targets.”
One reason for the lapses may be that the number of possible jihadists inside France has continued to expand sharply. France has seen 1,000 to 2,000 of its citizens go to fight in Syria or Iraq, with about 200 returning, and the task of surveillance has grown overwhelming.
The questions facing French intelligence services will begin with the attack at Charlie Hebdo.
The authorities knew that striking the satirical newspaper and its editor for their vulgar treatment of the Prophet Muhammad had been a stated goal of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, through its propaganda journal, Inspire.
Intelligence officers had also identified the Kouachi brothers as being previously involved in jihad-related activities, for which Chérif was convicted in 2008. Investigators have also linked Chérif to a plot to free from prison an Islamic militant convicted in the 1995 bombing of a French subway station; Coulibaly was also implicated in that case.
Much remains unclear about the three suspects and whether they were working in a coordinated fashion. But the French apparently knew, or presumably should have known, either on their own or through close intelligence cooperation with the US, that Saïd had travelled to Yemen in 2011. Saïd had met with the American-born Anwar al Awlaki, a member and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who was later killed by an American drone strike.
Security officials and acquaintances said that Kouachi’s travels in Yemen stretched from 2009 until at least 2012.
Mohammed al Kibsi, a journalist, said he met Kouachi in Sana, the Yemeni capital, in January 2010. At the time, Kibsi was working on an article about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas 2009, in a plot that intelligence officials believed was guided by Awlaki.
While looking for Abdulmutallab’s house, Kibsi said, he came across Kouachi playing football with a group of children. Kouachi told him that he and Abdulmutallab were friends: they had lived together for a week or two, a few months before the bombing attempt. They were both learning Arabic at the Sana Institute for Arabic Language, and both worshiped at the same local mosque, he said.
Kouachi was “so friendly” and spoke using a mix of English and French, Kibsi said, adding that he saw Kouachi on at least two other occasions, at a different Arabic institute in Sana’s old city.
Yemen has been an American priority, not a French one, making it likely that the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were put lower on the priority list, intelligence analysts said.
Indeed, Coulibaly apparently met President Nicolas Sarkozy in July 2009, according to the French newspaper Le Parisien. At an event to encourage youth employment, Coulibaly was scheduled to be among a group of nine people who had taken part in a work-training programme and was working at a Coca-Cola factory in the Parisian suburbs.
“It is a pleasure to meet the president,” he told a journalist before the meeting. “I don’t know what I’m going to say to him. I will start with, ‘Good morning!’”
The authorities have now released pictures of Coulibaly and a companion, Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, though it was not clear what became of her and how deep her links were to the group.
People in the Gennevilliers suburb where Chérif Kouachi lived described a man who, by appearances, was a devout and solemn Muslim, if giving a few hints of extremism.
Mohammed Benali, president of the mosque in Gennevilliers, said Chérif was an infrequent visitor who was polite, was shaven, wore jeans, and showed no signs of radicalisation —- “except for one incident.”
During France’s recent election, the imam consecrated a Friday prayer to the importance of voting, which prompted Kouachi to jump up abruptly in the prayer hall and begin arguing that it was un-Islamic to vote.
“Our security personnel escorted him outside,” Benali said. “They tried to calm him down. They asked him to respect our mosque and our people.”
For the French authorities, the basic questions are why they had not monitored the three men more aggressively and why the offices of Charlie Hebdo were not better protected.
“The problem we face is that even though there are not that many radicalised Muslims in France, there are enough of them to make it difficult to physically follow everyone with a suspicious background,” said Camille Grand, a former French official and director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, an independent Paris group.
“It’s one thing to listen to the phone calls or watch their travel, but it’s another to put someone under permanent physical surveillance, or even follow all their phone conversations full time for so many people,” she added.
Jean-Charles Brisard, head of the French Centre for Analysis of Terrorism, said there were simply not enough police and security officers to keep full monitoring on everyone who goes through prison. “It’s a problem of resources,” Brisard said.
He added that the authorities had Chérif Kouachi under surveillance “for a period of time, but then they judged that there was no threat, or the threat was lower, and they had other priorities.”
“We are understaffed,” complained an officer involved in the search of Chérif Kouachi’s apartment in the Gennevilliers suburb. “We would need to triple our staff to better protect the city.”
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