European securitySchengen agreement allows free movement of terrorists: French security panel

A French parliamentary committee said on Tuesday that potential terrorists can move too freely in the Schengen open-border area, and that EU member-states should more systematically flag up suspects on a shared police database.

The committee also called for reforming France’s six intelligence services and recommended merging them into a single counterterrorism agency.

The Huffington Post reports that the 300-page report by the committee, tasked in January with examining all aspects of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, focused on the debilitating effects of poor coordination among French police and intelligence services, and among the twenty-six European countries which are members of the Schengen agreement.

Samy Amimour, one of the Paris attackers, was placed under judicial supervision in 2012 for attempting to go to Yemen, but was still able to leave France in 2013 and travel to Syria via Italy and Turkey.

Belgium’s failure to share information about Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the Brussels-based terror cell which killed 130 people in Paris in the November attack, allowed him to avoid arrest in Greece ten months before the attacks. Sébastien Pietrasanta, a senior member of the French committee, said the Belgian authorities “did not warn the Greeks in time” that he was suspected of directing a terror cell in Belgium from his Athens hideout.

Another terrorist who took part in the Paris attack, Salah Abdeslam, was allowed to leave France because Belgium did not alert the French to his radicalization.

He was stopped by the French police at the Belgium border, after security was tightened in the immediate aftermath of the 13 November attacks, but the French police let him go after holding him for half an hour, because the Schengen Information System database listed his criminal past but not his radicalization.

His radicalization, however, was already known to the Belgian authorities, and detailed records of police surveillance of him were included in his file at the Belgian intelligence service – but that information was not uploaded to the Schengen Information System database.

The Belgian police did eventually send this information to the French authorities – but this was already an hour after he was allowed to re-enter Belgium.

Abdeslam managed to stay in hiding in Belgium for more than four months, and was captured in March in Brussels.

The committee said that “strengthening” the Schengen database was essential, as was the granting the law enforcement agency Europol and the EU border surveillance agency Frontex full access to it.

The committee also noted that the information Schengen member-states were uploading to the database was not uniform, and that that information should  include warnings about radicalization.

Georges Fenech, the committee chairman, said French and European counterterrorism services urgently needed an overhaul. “We have structures that date from the 1980s, when terrorism was not what it is today.

“We must be much more ambitious — to reform our intelligence-gathering and truly coordinate it at the European level,” Fenech said.

He noted that the three of the attackers at the Bataclan concert hall were known to security services because of their radicalization and ties to terrorism, and yet their trace was lost.

The committee went beyond examining the November attacks to criticize the French security services for failing to maintain surveillance of the Kouachi brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack in January last year, and the services’ failure to keep track of Amédy Coulibaly, an extremist known to the authorities who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack.

The major recommendation of the committee was to create a new national counterterrorism agency directly under the authority of the prime minister.