On Wednesday April 22nd the French government revealed that a terror plot to attack churches near Paris had been foiled after a 24-year-old student was arrested in the capital. Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who was detained after he suffered a gunshot wound after apparently accidentally shooting himself, is suspected of planning with others to launch a gun attack on two churches in the town of Villejuif, south of Paris. He is also the main suspect in the murder of 32-year-old fitness instructor Aurélie Châtelain, who was found shot dead in her car at Villejuif on Sunday April 19th. Within hours of the dramatic revelation that a terrorist attack had been “foiled”, the government was proclaiming that the incident underlined the need for the highly-controversial surveillance law that is currently going through the French Parliament.
“We must always improve our intelligence capability under the rule of law, both now and in the future,” President François Hollande declared on Wednesday. “That's the reason why there is a bill under discussion, I hope that this bill is adopted.” The message was repeated by interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve on TF1 television news on the same day, when he noted: “We are in the process of putting in place targeted measures in the fight against terrorism that are designed to reinforce the effectiveness of the [security] services … the intelligence law is there for that.” Even more explicitly prime minister Manuel Valls claimed on Thursday morning in an interview on France Inter radio that “the intelligence law would have provided greater means to the intelligence services to carry out a certain number of surveillances”.
However, a cold look at the facts known so far about the case casts doubt on this instant analysis by a government that has come under fire from human rights groups, judges, the internet community and France's independent administrative authorities over the proposed new law.
It is clear that Sid Ahmed Ghlam, a 24-year-old information technology student of Algerian nationality, was already in the files of the domestic intelligence service, the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI). According to Le Monde, he had been reported to the authorities by someone close to him in the spring of 2014 after he had expressed a desire to go to Syria. Ghlam was then called in by the DGSI for what is known as an 'administrative interview'. According to a report by the French Senate, the DGSI routinely carries out this kind of interview to “better determine the profile type of people involved in terrorist networks”. Neither the interview nor data from his phone apparently revealed any evidence of terrorist links and no further action was taken.
In February 2015 Ghlam spent a week in Turkey. After his return the student was again called in by the DGSI and placed under surveillance. But once again no evidence was found to justify taking criminal proceedings against him. “We carried out all the checks that should be made,” declared interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve. “Once these checks revealed no connections with terrorist circles, we are under the rule of law and under a rule of law we fight against terrorism by respecting principles of law.”
However, Ghlam was the object of a security file known as an 'S13' - the 'S' standing for 'state security' – corresponding to a “medium” security risk, according to the interior minister. Such a status meant that police officers should report it if they came across Ghlam during a search but should do so “without attracting attention”. This does not necessarily imply there was active surveillance of the student by the intelligence services.
Last Sunday, April 19th, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who had apparently accidentally shot himself with his gun, called the ambulance services from the 13th arrondissement in Paris. He claimed that a man had shot him in the legs to steal his bag. The emergency services took him to hospital and alerted the police, as is standard procedure with injuries caused by firearms.
Police officers then tracked the student's blood trail back to his car. Inside it they saw a flashing light, of the type used by emergency services. At the same time the intelligence services were alerted by the identity of the “victim”. The go-ahead was given to search Sid Ahmed Ghlam's residence and car. In the vehicle the officers found a Kalashnikov automatic rifle and two automatic pistols. In the student's flat, not far from the François-Mitterrand library in Paris, they found three other Kalashnikovs, four bullet-proof vests, flashing lights and police armbands. The investigators also discovered documents revealing plans for an attack, last Sunday April 19th, on two churches in Villejuif while mass was being held. After these discoveries Sid Ahmed Ghlam was immediately placed in custody in his hospital bed at Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris. Five days later, on Friday April 24th, an examining magistrate visited him in hospital and he was formally placed under investigation – one step short of charges being brought – for “murder and attempted murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise”. Investigators are still hunting for the student's possible accomplices amid suggestions that he was being “controlled” by others, possibly from Syria. Ghlam's lawyer Matthieu de Vallois said his client would “vigorously” contest the allegations against him.
So how exactly would the surveillance and intelligence bill currently going through the French Parliament have changed the way this case was dealt with? Manuel Valls was cautious about giving details about this during his radio interview on Thursday. The proposed legislation legalises the use of some intrusive intelligence-gathering techniques - GPS trackers, listening devices, IMSI-catchers to eavesdrop on mobile phone conversations, and so on – that are already employed by the intelligence services, and broadens the “purposes” of intelligence gathering well beyond terrorism. For example, intelligence gathering would be allowed for the “prevention of attacks on the republican system of institutions” and “mass violence of a nature that could undermine national security”. The bill also authorises the installation of algorithms directly on the networks of internet hosts or internet service providers to detect suspicious behaviour on the part of internet users according to predefined criteria.
Yet, as in the cases of the Charlie Hebdo killers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and the gunman who targeted French soldiers and a Jewish school in south-west France in 2012, Mohamed Merah, Sid Ahmed Ghlam was already on the DGSI's radar. So in theory the algorithms provided for under the bill would have been of little use. As interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve himself said last week: “Ghlam was flagged to the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI) in the spring of 2014.” He said that interviews with the student then and during his second questioning in February 2015, plus examination of his mobile phone data, had “revealed nothing”.
Prioritising the targets
Once Sid Ahmed Ghlam had come to their attention, would the proposed new legislation have helped the intelligence services keep better surveillance on him? Could, for example, the new law have allowed the intelligence services to use listening devices to monitor his residence? Legally, perhaps, but there is no indication that the intelligence services would have considered Sid Ahmed Ghlam as a sufficiently important target to put in place such an intrusive surveillance technique. According to Bernard Cazeneuve, security officials had apparently not judged it necessary to eavesdrop on him or keep watch on him, actions which are already authorised under the current law. Under the law as it stands, a whole series of measures can be put in place once there is suspicion of terrorism, such as phone-tapping, the interception of electronic communications and the gathering of a person's internet login details.
So the main challenge is not so much to spot the dangerous individuals, but rather to know how to prioritise their importance as potentially serious risks, as a recent report by the French Senate highlighted. After the Paris terror attacks in January this year the number of reported “radicalised persons” went from 1,498 to 3,246 in three months. The number of individuals directly implicated in networks relating to Syria – 1,432 – now makes up nearly half of the “3,000 individuals requiring particular attention from the DGSI”, said the committee of inquiry into jihadist networks. The “overwhelmed” security services are no longer managing to keep pace “even though the events of January 2015 showed the pressing need not to ignore the surveillance of older targets”, the report said.
“I believe that it would be better to focus on intelligence on the ground than on what the intelligence law proposes,” wrote François-Bernard Huygue, a director of research at the Paris-based French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS) on the Atlantico website. “What's proposed brings little to the fight against terrorism. And it is not much use finding new suspect profiles if you cannot already manage to deal effectively with those that are already in our files,” he added.
The discovery of the significant arsenal of weapons in Sid Ahmed Ghlam's car and student residence – four Kalashnikovs, a Sphinx pistol, a Sig Sauer pistol that had been declared stolen by a police officer and magazines – raises another question. How could an individual who was the subject of an 'S' file get hold of weapons so easily without attracting the attention of the police or the DGSI? “We note that a large number of weapons or illicit materials are trafficked across the country in motor vehicles,” said the police branch of the CGT trade union, one of the smaller police union branches. “Why not take that into account? Recent examples don't seem to have been analysed. Focussing all attention on data networks will not solve anything. It is certainly a factor to pursue but it is not sufficient,” it said in a statement.
Prime minister Manuel Valls, however, has continued to place focus on the surveillance bill, while at the same time ratcheting up the rhetoric about the terror threat. “We have never had to face this type of terrorism in our history,” said Valls. “The whole of France is targeted because of what she stands for. That's why we must wage war on terrorists, that's why we must wage war on terrorism, without waging war on who we are.”
On a visit to Villejuif on Wednesday, the prime minister stood in front of a church, and declared: “Wanting to attack a church, that is attacking a symbol of France, it's the very essence of France that they doubtless wanted to target.” These comments were singled out by green politician and former minister Pascal Canfin, who called on Manuel Valls to show more “neutrality”. He said: “Be careful, when one is prime minister of the secular Republic, not to say that, on one side there are religions linked to the essence of France, while others are in some way imported.”
The prime minister has also been evoking the “spirit of January 11th”, a reference to the extraordinary marches that took place across France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris kosher supermarket killings at the start of 2015. “The best response from a democracy such as ours is not to give way to fear, and is to keep the spirit of January 11th, in other words the ability of the French people to come together against terrorism, against barbarity,” he said on Thursday. Indeed, ever since the terror attacks the government, which has struggled to show results on economic and social fronts, has regularly sought to revive the spirit of January 11th, which marked a brief period when President François Hollande's public approval ratings rose.
The government has also toughened its tone on the issue of terrorism and civil liberties. During a debate on the surveillance bill, legislation that he personally defended in the National Assembly, Manuel Valls reproached those calling for a more balanced approach, or who rejected the new surveillance measures, for lacking “statesmanship”. Then last Thursday Manuel Valls showed some irritation on the subject when talking about the proposed bill, asking: “Just what is this debate on freedom?” In doing so he appeared to brush aside the complaints of many opponents of the bill who see it as a profound attack on the right to privacy.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter