Was it, in the end, yet another failure by the intelligence services? Ayoub El-Khazzani, who was arrested after a thwarted armed attack on an Amsterdam to Paris train last Friday evening, and placed under formal investigation late on Tuesday night for attempted murder as part of a terrorist attack, had already been flagged to French officials by Spanish counterparts back in February 2014. As French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed at the weekend this was because he was believed to belong to the “radical Islamist movement”.
As a result the 25-year-old, born on September 3rd, 1989, at Tétouan in northern Morocco, was made the subject of an 'S' file by the French intelligence services, the 'S' standing for 'sûreté de l’État' or 'state security'. In this he was far from alone; previous people with 'S' files have included the Toulouse gunman Mohammed Merah, Mehdi Nemmouche, accused of a murderous attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the Kouachi brothers Chérif and Saïd who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, accused of planning to attack a church at Villejuif near Paris, Yassin Salhi, arrested for beheading his boss in eastern France, and several thousand others.
The 'S' files are a sub-category of the so-called fichier des personnes recherchées (FPR) – the 'wanted persons file' – and include hooligans, environmental and economical sit-in protesters known as 'Zadistes' and extreme left-wing activists. It is impossible to know exactly how many people are on such files.
In January this year, just after the Paris terror attacks, prime minister Manuel Valls referred to “3,000 people involved in the terrorist movement” without giving further details. Then on April 13th, during the debates on the controversial new surveillance law, Valls said that “one physical surveillance can involve 20 agents. So the requirements for keeping watch on the 3,000 people involved directly or indirectly in the terrorist movement or on the internet very greatly exceed our services' capacity.”
The 'S' files are compiled solely by the intelligence services and each are given a ranking from 2 to 16. According to a police source, this numbering does not reflect the perceived danger posed by a suspect but instead indicates how officials in France or anywhere in the Schengen area – the zone inside which there are in theory no internal borders – should react to the suspect during passport controls or police checks. For level 3, which is the category ascribed to Ayoub El-Khazzani, the instructions are for officials “not to attract attention, to collect the maximum information and, if possible, make a copy of the identity documents”.
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“'S' files, they involve a lot of people,” says investigating judge Marc Trévidic, who after ten years of specialising in anti-terrorism cases is taking up a new judicial appointment in Lille, northern France, at the end of this month. “They don't allow you to arrest people, but to search their luggage at the borders and to photocopy their passport, so they can be tracked and the [intelligence] services can be informed. Some of them deserve to be investigated but you can't take everyone with a file through the judicial system, it's the eternal debate between intelligence and the judicial system,” he says.
Since the thwarted attack last Friday the French intelligence services have been trying to defuse any potential controversy over their effectiveness. The stakes are even higher now for at the end of June Bernard Cazeneuve himself took over the reins of the anti-terrorist apparatus. He created a new counter-terrorism command body that brings together officials from the domestic intelligence agency the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI), police detectives, Paris police officials and gendarmes, in a bid to end turf wars and to ensure that information circulates more effectively. This unit reports directly to the minister's office and is run by prefect Olivier-Pierre de Mazière.
But the potential for embarrassment over last week's train attack is still there. An anonymous “senior police official” told Le Figaro newspaper categorically that “at no time was Ayoub El-Khazzani's presence on French soil flagged”. Yet in various newspaper and media interviews the young man's father, Mohammed El-Khazzani, said that his son had indeed lived in France for several weeks at least, from March 2014. And the mobile phone company Lycamobile then confirmed that the Moroccan worked for them in France at that time, though his contract was cut short because he lacked a work permit. His father says that after losing his job his son kept moving between France and Belgium, which was where El-Khazzani says he has been living recently.
Ayoub El-Khazzani had left Morocco with the rest of his family in 2007 to go to Spain, where his father, a farm worker, had earned the right to remain. The family lived first in Madrid then in the working class El Saladillo district of Algeciras in the far south of the country. During his time in Madrid Ayoub El-Khazzani was twice picked up by police for selling cannabis. “But he had very little on him, he was just a young boy at the time,” says his 65-year-old father Mohammed El-Khazzani.
Spanish newspaper El Pais claims that Ayoub El-Khazzani was later put under surveillance by the Spanish secret services after a third arrest in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, in 2012. At the time he was suspected of bringing in cannabis from Morocco. According to El Pais, Spanish police believed he also had links with radical Islamist groups that were under surveillance, and may have used his family's home in Algeciras, close to the Straits of Gibraltar, as a base from which to “come and go from one side to the other” between North Africa and Europe.
Can a democracy keep watch over everything?
During his initial questioning last Friday Ayoub El-Khazzani explained, via an interpreter, that he had travelled a great deal across Europe. “Over the last six months – he didn't go back any further – he was in Belgium, then in Germany, then Austria, from Austria he went to Germany, and he left Germany to return to Belgium,” said lawyer Sophie David, who represented the arrested man during his initial questioning. “In the meantime he was in France and Andorra, but we're not sure how to explain the journey,” she said. “He explained that he went through France … but clearly for a very limited period.”
According to the newspaper Libération, El-Khazzani only re-appeared on DGSI's radar - thanks to the information exchange system the Schengen Information System - on May 10th, 2015, in Berlin from where he took a Germanwings flight to Istanbul in Turkey. The Spanish intelligence services say that from there he went to Syria. However, according to lawyer Sophie David the Moroccan denies having visited the war-torn country. He is understood to have claimed that someone else must have travelled on his identity papers, which he says were stolen while he was living rough in Brussels.
Ayoub El-Khazzani has also denied being involved with radical Islamists and “any suggestion of terrorism”. According to his version of events, he had boarded the Thalys train in Belgium simply with the aim of robbing passengers on board with a Kalashnikov AKM assault rifle he had found in public gardens near the Gare du Midi station in Brussels where he often slept with other homeless people. It is a defence strategy that is unlikely to convince investigators, and one which has been used recently by suspects in other attacks or attempted attacks. For example in June Yassin Sahli spoke of personal motives rather than ideology to explain his actions after he was placed under formal investigation for the beheading of his boss at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in east France. El-Khazzani's claims are also undermined by evidence from his mobile phone that on the train he watched a video of a chant calling for jihad, just moments before he started using his weapons.
On Friday night the suspect was transferred to the offices of the DGSI and the SDAT counter terrorism unit at Levallois-Perret in the northwest suburbs of Paris. On Tuesday the Paris prosecutor François Molins formally opened an investigation into “attempted murder as part of a terrorist enterprise”, plus the “possession of arms as part of a terrorist enterprise” and “participation in a terrorist conspiracy with view to preparing one or several crimes against the person”. El-Khazzani himself was put in provisional detention then, late on Tuesday, formally placed under investigation – one step short of charges being brought – in relation to the offences. At a press conference François Molins described the suspect's claims as “far-fetched and evasive declarations” and spoke of a “targeted and premeditated attack”. A key part of the investigation is likely to focus on whether El-Khazzani had any accomplices.
This will inevitably lead investigators to Belgium where the Moroccan joined the train and where he claims he had been sleeping rough. The federal prosecutor there, Frédéric Van Leeuw, has also opened an investigation into possible links between El-Khazzani and jihadist cells in Belgium. And on Monday night searches were carried out at two addresses in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, a working class area of Brussels, where the suspect is believed to have stayed. According to the news website DH.be, Belgian investigators searched the homes of El-Khazzani's sister and one of his friends. Several objects were taken away but no arrests were made.
Earlier on Monday the Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon confirmed that the Moroccan was known to the country's intelligence services but had not been “tailed 24/7”, on the grounds that he was not considered dangerous. “That's why he was not followed 24/7 but we kept an eye on him,” explained the minister. Even so it raises the question as to how a man who was on the files of three European intelligence agencies could have obtained an East German-made Kalashnikov AKM assault rifle, with nine magazines containing a total of 270 rounds, a 9mm Luger pistol with magazine, a retractable cutter and a 50cl bottle containing petrol, and taken them on board a train without attracting attention.
Amedy Coulibaly, who carried out the bloody assault on the Jewish supermarket in Paris during the January terror attacks, also bought his weapons in Belgium. On Sunday the Belgian justice minister Koen Greens accepted that there had been failings in the country's fight against arms trafficking. “It's obvious that far too many illegal Kalashnikovs arrive here from Eastern Europe and we must tackle [the issue] once again,” he told the Flemish TV station VTM.
Belgium faces a threat from its own jihadist networks. According to calculations made by Le Monde, with 40 people per million involved in such networks, Belgium is the European country most affected by this problem, well ahead of Denmark or France. On January 16th, 2015, shortly after the attacks in Paris, Belgian police killed two people during a major anti-terrorism operation at Verviers in the east of the country, and claim to have thwarted an “imminent attack” by a jihadist cell. “This year we have opened more cases than in the whole of 2014 and it's a record number with 195 cases,” federal prosecutor Frédéric Van Leeuw said on Sunday. Just last week Islamic State issued new threats against the country. “Everywhere will be affected in Belgium. Libraries, schools, hospitals, shopping streets, discos … all the places where you can find infidels,” declared a jihadist called Anversois, who went to Syria in June 2013.
Meanwhile the question arises as to whether intelligences services could or should have done better in relation to the Thalys train attack in France. “There could have been errors made in this case, as with all human activity, but one must also take into account the fact that there are thousands of 'S' files involving people who could go on to carry out an act,” the former anti-terrorism investigating judge Gilbert Thiel told Mediapart. “The growing number of these files doesn't mean that there is a lack of response from the police: if that suspect had not been flagged the [intelligence] services would have been criticised for that too.”
Gilbert Thiel said there was a question as to how much more one could do to ensure people's safety. “After the planned attack [editor's note, on churches] at Villejuif the public authorities called for the protection of all religious buildings. After Charlie it was organs of the press. After Saint-Quentin-Fallavier it was all Seveso factories. And now all trains and stations? It's impossible – as is, incidentally, protecting all of Tunisia's beaches. The system is overloaded,” he said.
The former judge, who worked on anti-terrorism cases for twenty years, said that the intelligence services needed strengthening and required more personnel “even if some efforts have been made in recent months”. He added: “We are faced with a long-drawn-out problem, with sources of terrorists here and abroad, and faced with people whom France is fighting both at home and abroad. But it bothers me a bit to hear talk of blunders by the [intelligence] services every time there is an event.” Gilbert Thiel concluded:“I know these guys who risk their skin every day in undercover operations for the security of us all.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter