France's attempts to de-radicalise homegrown Islamist extremists in the wake of terror attacks has been pronounced a "total fiasco" in need of a complete overhaul in a damning parliamentary study, reports The Telegraph.
President François Hollande launched the drive to reverse radicalisation among thousands of French Muslims in the wake of terror attacks that have killed 238 people since January 2015.
However, the report, by a cross-party senate committee, was denounced as an amateurish flop this week, accusing the government of funding "pseudo-experts" who pocketed millions of euros with few tangible results.
Among the damning revelations in the report were the fact that the only de-radicalisation centre currently up and running, and fully staffed at an annual cost of 2.5 million euros, is in fact empty. Among the last people it housed - supposedly non-threatening individuals tempted by radical Islam - one turned out to be on a terror watchlist and the other was caught seeking to reach Syria.
Twelve other centres slated to be set up have not been opened.
The report also found that many local associations supposed to help families deal with radicalised members are incompetent at best and many signed up simply to obtain public funding.
One supposedly groundbreaking programme to bring back radicalised inmates to the French Republican fold had to be scrapped after a prisoner duped the authorities into believing that he had reformed before seeking to murder guards.
The report was seized on by Marine Le Pen’s Front National as validating its call to have Islamists detained or deported.
Some 15,000 people in France are followers of radical Islam, with a further 680, including about 275 women, thought to have joined jihadist movements in Iraq and Syria, the socialist government has estimated. There are deep concerns in the intelligence community that many French who fought in Islamist ranks abroad will now return and try to wreak violence back home.