President Emmanuel Macron is to tighten oversight of counter-terror intelligence units and wants to bolster police powers as part of plans to adapt to a fast-changing terror threat and end France’s 20-month state of emergency, reports the Financial Times.
Pierre Bousquet de Florian, a former intelligence official, will lead a unit of about 20 analysts based within the presidential administration, fulfilling a pledge made by Mr Macron during his election campaign to create a “task force” on terrorism to respond to a series of deadly Islamist attacks.
The unit will review intelligence gathered by agents in the interior, defence and justice ministries and is intended to centralise and facilitate exchanges of information between agencies.
“The goal is get a global vision of the threat and make sure the different agencies actually work together,” a presidential aide said on Wednesday. Another said: “We want to be able to cover all the grey areas that terrorists are good at exploiting.”
The announcement comes a day after an Algerian student wounded a police officer with a hammer in front of tourists outside Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris.
France has been on high terror alert for more than two years and has suffered a wave of Islamist attacks since in 2012, when Mohammed Merah killed Jewish primary school children and soldiers in Toulouse.
The pace of assaults accelerated after January 2015, when French-born Islamist extremists murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, police officers and customers of a Jewish supermarket in Paris. In November 2015, 130 people were killed and 413 were injured in cafés and the Bataclan music hall in central Paris.