On Tuesday, French lawmakers announced the results of a six-month inquiry into their nation’s intelligence services, still reeling from two deadly terrorist attacks in 2015. The committee’s major recommendation: create a unified intelligence structure better equipped to prevent future attacks, reports The Washington Post.
In January 2015, extremists attacked the editorial offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and, two days later, a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris. On Nov. 13, 2015, militants with ties to the Islamic State killed 130 in coordinated attacks on a stadium, a concert hall and cafes across the city — the bloodiest attack on French soil since World War II.
In both cases, the inquiry’s leaders acknowledged Tuesday, the perpetrators were previously known to authorities. Some were under judicial surveillance at the time of the attacks, while others had prior convictions.
Regardless of previous track records of terrorist activity, in the aftermath of the November attacks, one of the known suspects, Salah Abdeslam, managed to elude both French and Belgian authorities for four months before he was arrested in a shootout that authorities think was among the triggers for the March 22 attacks on the Brussels subway and airport.
In April, Abdeslam, a French citizen who had been living in Belgium, was extradited to France, where he has since refused to answer any questions put to him by French judges. The full extent of his involvement in the November attacks remains unclear.
Georges Fenech, a conservative member of France’s National Assembly who spearheaded the inquiry, placed the bulk of the blame on what he called France’s overly complicated intelligence apparatus, an overlapping structure of various agencies that are not always in contact with one another.
“We could have avoided the attack of the Bataclan if there had not been these failures,” he told reporters, referring to the Paris concert hall where the bulk of the casualties in the November attacks occurred.
Along with a colleague, Sébastien Pietrasanta, a Socialist, Fenech advocated the creation of a singular intelligence structure that would resemble MI5 in Britain or the National Counterterrorism Center in the United States, which the inquiry commission visited in the course of their investigation.