TerrorismTerrorists “stockpiling explosives in Europe”: EU security official

Published 25 May 2016

Manuel Navarrete Paniagua, the Head of the European Counter Terrorism Center at Europol, said that terrorist cells in the EU are probably stockpiling explosives for future attacks. Europol said it had foiled 211 terror plots in the last year, but that the threat of similar attacks on the scale of November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 attacks in Brussels in March remained a concern.

Manuel Navarrete Paniagua, the Head of the European Counter Terrorism Center at Europol, said that terrorist cells in the EU are probably stockpiling explosives for future attacks.

Europol said it had foiled 211 terror plots in the last year, but that the threat of similar attacks on the scale of November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 attacks in Brussels in March remained a concern.

Paniagua warned on Monday that “large clandestine stockpiles of explosives” are likely being set up by terrorist groups,EUObserver reports.

Speaking at a briefing of Europol’s EU Terrorism Situation & Trend Report, due to be released next month, Paniagua told members of the EU Parliament: “We have some information reported by the member states that terrorists groups are trying to establish large clandestine stockpiles of explosives in the European Union to be used eventually in large scale home attacks.”

More than 4,000 foreign fighters have been identified in the EU and entered into a Europol database.

Paniagua said: “Using the terrorist financial tracking program, we provided last year more than 2,700 leads regarding foreign terrorist fighters to the member states.”

TheEUObservernotes that a key conclusion of the report suggests that “jihadist terrorism” remains the top threat to security in the EU, with recent attacks suggesting better coordination among terrorists than previously believed.

Paniagua said terror groups’ use of explosives and firearms suggests they pose a rapidly evolving threat.

Paniagua also addressed the concern of  jihadists using refugee flows to enter Europe in order to carry out attacks against Western targets.

“We found no evidence of the systematic use of this flow to infiltrate terrorists into the European Union. But they do, they use it, we have some cases, some of the people that perpetrated the Paris attacks were eventually disguised in this immigration flow,” said Paniagua.

Europol said in May that it will deploy around 200 counter-extremism officers and investigators at refugee arrival centers in Europe, especially those with large numbers of arrivals such as in Italy and Greece.