Before entering the Gambetta-Carnot secondary school in Arras, north-east France, last Friday, when he fatally stabbed a teacher, 20-year-old Mohammed Mogoushkov had been under surveillance by France’s domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, for more than two months. His phone conversations were listened to and his use of the internet was most probably tracked.
He featured on what is called an “S” list, a database containing the details of thousands of people who are regarded as a threat to public order, from football hooligans to radical Islamists. One of his brothers is currently serving a prison sentence for his part in the planning of a terrorist attack in France.
Shortly after arriving at the school on Friday, Mogoushkov, who arrived in France in 2008 with his parents and siblings from their native Ingushetia, a republic in the Russian Caucasus region, confronted and stabbed French-language teacher and father of three Dominique Bernard, 57, and seriously wounded another teacher, a technician and a cleaner. Witnesses said that before police arrived, when he was overpowered with the use of a Taser and arrested, he was heard calling out “Allahu Akbar”, the Arabic for “god is great”.
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Mogoushkov had reportedly been looking for a history teacher, which added to the parallels drawn between his attack and the stabbing murder and decapitation on October 16th 2020 of Samuel Paty, 47, a history and geography teacher, close to his school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Paty’s gruesome murder, committed by an 18-year-old Islamic extremist of Chechen origin, caused widespread shock, and especially among the teaching profession.
Paty was targeted because he had shown cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in a civic education class on freedom of expression. He had warned Muslim pupils of this beforehand to allow those who so wished to not attend the class.
Exactly why Mogoushkov carried out his knife rampage is still unclear. Police sources cited in French media on Sunday said he has so far not explained why, nor in the name of what, he decided on the attack.
It should be noted that the authorities were quick to admit failures in preventing Mogoushkov commit the murder of a schoolteacher, the second in three years. Two hours after the attack on Friday morning, Mediapart and several other media were informed that he had been the subject of “active” surveillance by the DGSI “since very recently”. He had even been visited on Thursday of last week, the day before his attack, when no grounds were found to detain him.
An officer within an anti-terrorist service, whose identity is withheld, detailed that the monitoring of Mogoushkov “since this summer” involved physical surveillance and “multiple intelligence techniques”. The source defended the approach of the DGSI. “His phone conversations had not provided evidence over recent days that he would take action,” he said. “So the profile appeared to be a radicalised individual whose potential was known but who suddenly decided to move into action, making his neutralisation difficult.”
Speaking to television channel TF1 on Friday evening, French interior minister Gérald Darmanin said: “This person was in contact with other radicalised people. His phone had been tapped since several days.” Darmanin added that the DGSI had “suspected something”, and that when Mogoushkov was contacted by officers last Thursday the intention had been to also place on him or his belongings “more intrusive” technical devices, including for his “geolocation”. But Darmanin insisted that Mogoushkov did not appear to present an immediate threat and no weapon was found in his possession.
Darmanin on Saturday said Mohammed Mogoushkov was first placed under surveillance because of his “links” with his brother Movsar, who was last April sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in a terrorist plot to attack the French presidential offices, the Élysée Palace. In June, Movsar Mogoushkov was also handed an 18-month jail term for relaying terrorist propaganda he posted on X (the former Twitter), which included violent contents, notably produced by the so-called Islamic State group.
When the Mogoushkov family first settled in France from the Russian Federation’s republic of Ingushetia in 2008, they lived in the town of Rennes, in the north-west Britanny region. In 2014, the parents and their five children were ordered to be extradited back to the Russian Federation after an asylum request was rejected. However, their case was taken up by various rights organisations and the expulsion order was finally overturned.
They moved to Arras in 2015, and in 2018 Mohammed Mogoushkov’s father, who Darmanin said espoused “radical Islam” and who had been placed on the “S” list, was finally expelled from France.
An officer with France’s intelligence services, but who is not a member of the DGSI, told Mediapart that it was the sudden, unannounced nature of Mohammed Mogoushkov’s attack that made it difficult to prevent. “When one is confronted with a terrorist who chooses such an operational mode it becomes very difficult to carry out preventive action,” he said. “The British services were faced with this problem with the terrorist attacks that hit them in 2017. You might well have followed your suspect, identified his relationships through technical means, through human sources, [but] if he takes action on his own, with a simple knife, you will have had the greatest difficulty in seeing it coming.”
But France has been the target on numerous occasions of terrorist individuals who were known, who were under surveillance and better armed than Mohammed Mogoushkov.
The intelligence directorate of the Paris police prefecture (the DRPP) had been following Chérif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who carried out the January 2015 shooting attack against the staff of weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, as of the moment he was freed from prison in 2011. He had by then served a prison sentence for his involvement in a jihadist recruitment network based in north Paris. But as Mediapart has previously revealed, the surveillance did not prevent him from travelling to Yemen, where Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) gave him the mission of committing the massacre at Charlie Hebdo which left 12 dead and 11 wounded. The DGSI, alerted to the danger by the CIA, took over surveillance of Kouachi for a period of two years, but was no more successful in preventing him from carrying out the attack with his brother Saïd.
On April 19th 2015, three months after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Sid-Ahmed Ghlam, a 23-year-old student, shot dead a woman while trying to steal her car during his attempted attack against two churches in the Paris suburb of Villejuif. His plan failed when he accidentally also shot himself in the foot. One year earlier, his nine-year-old brother had told his schoolteacher that Ghlam wanted “to kill French people” and go to heaven. Questioned by the DGSI, Ghlam admitted being fervent in his religious beliefs, but denied any jihadist commitment.
While the DGSI reported that “his reading and opinions demonstrated his favour for Salafist theories”, Ghlam was allowed to walk free, and 12 months later embarked on his fatal attempted terrorist attack in Villejuif.
On June 13th 2016, Larossi Abballa murdered police officer Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his partner, Jessica Schneider, a member of the administrative staff of a police station, at their home in Magnanville, west of Paris. The knife attack was carried out in front of their three-year-old son, who survived. Four years earlier, Abballa, 25, was a member of a jihadist cell and had made known his wish to carry out terrorist attacks in France. In the months before the murders of the couple, his phone was placed under surveillance as part of an investigation into a group organising the travel of jihadists from France to Syria. But his intention to carry out the killings of Salvaing and Schneider was not identified.
On July 26th 2016, one month after the Magnanville attack, Jacques Hamel, a priest in the Normandy town of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, was stabbed to death in his church by two assailants. One of them, Adel Kermiche, had served a prison sentence for having attempted to join the Islamic State group in Syria. At the time of the attack, he was on parole and wearing an electronic tag. Furthermore, he had been discussing online with a DRPP agent acting in disguise.
On December 11th 2018, Cherif Chekatt, 29, murdered five people and wounded 11 others ijn a shooting attack at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, eastern France. He had become radicalised while serving several prison terms beginning in 2008. His espousal of Islamist extremism (Mediapart understands that he posted a photo of Osama bin Laden in one of his prison cells), had been recorded by prison services. “The penitentiary intelligence [service] sent us his environment [of contacts who] were likely to give him eventual logistical support,” recalled a DGSI officer. “They traced for us his relationships, his prisons, his fellow inmates, and their pedigrees. When he came out, we watched him. Every type of intelligence technique was used but we found nothing. He didn’t go the mosque, he met with no-one. We detected nothing.”
Before last week’s attack in Arras, the last flagrant example of such intelligence failures that Mediapart has recorded was on March 5th 2019, when two prison officers, at a jail in Condé-sur-Sarthe, north-west France, were stabbed by inmate Michaël Chiolo. In secret audio recordings within the prison made the day before his attack, radicalised inmates can be heard encouraging Chiolo to assault prison staff, advising him to stab their “ribs” and telling him that “Afterwards you’ll go to heaven”. A justice ministry report on the stabbings, revealed by French daily Le Figaro, found that there had been “an insufficiently organised use made of information”. Otherwise put, the audio recordings had not been studied in time to prevent the attacks.
Questioned on Friday by Mediapart, an examining magistrate who has worked on anti-terrorist investigations, speaking on condition his name is withheld, also defended the work of the intelligence services. “Even though the media like so much to criticise the [charge of] ‘associating with terrorists’, it remains a criminal offence that should be characterised,” he said. “An individual can adopt worrying behaviour, their radicalisation may be known, [but] as of what moment can one judicialize the administrative intelligence provided by the [intelligence] services? When we will have objective elements and, unfortunately, the dividing line is sometimes very fine.”
According to the officer with France’s intelligence services cited above they, and notably the DGSI, of which he is not part, face the problem of having too many objectives. “There are hundreds of individuals today in France who are evaluated by the services as being dangerous, [who are] under surveillance but not arrested because there is not the evidence to prove it,” he said. “All the intelligence services walk a tightrope with, on the one hand the respect of public liberties and, on the other, the defence of the nation’s interests.”
That view echoes that of “commissaire SI 562”, the codename given to the head of the DGSI’s investigations for judicial probes – anti-terrorist investigations led by a magistrate – between 2013 and 2020, in a previous interview with Mediapart. “The [intelligence] services are often accused of not having followed up leads which, after the event, appear obvious […] We, the intelligence services, are allowed powers, and we have them, but we act within a constitutional state. One can’t ask everything of the intelligence services. We are in a [democratic] republic, and so much the better. We’re not in a police state.”
He gave evidence, via a video link and under his protective codename “commissaire SI 562”, at the trial in 2020 of 14 people accused of involvement in the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris against Charlie Hebdo and, days later, a kosher supermarket. He attempted to explain why the surveillance of the Kouachi brothers had been abandoned seven months before their attack on Charlie Hebdo, telling the court that this was because manpower was needed to deal with another threat that appeared more urgent.
Clearly emotional, he addressed the survivors of the attacks: “I want very much to tell them that each terrorist attack is felt as a failure for all of us,” he said. “It is a regret to have carried out all this [surveillance] work and to not have succeeded in demonstrating the Kouachi [brothers’] projects.”
At the DGSI headquarters in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret, the weight of the failure to prevent the events in Arras last Friday must surely be immense.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse