Inquiry calls for French intelligence services overhaul

A French parliamentary commission of inquiry has recommended that French intelligence services be overhauled following last year’s terror attacks in Paris,

Commission president Georges Fenech said all the French attackers had been known to authorities, but these had not communicated with each other.

He proposed a single body like the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre.

The January and November attacks, which killed 147 people in all, prompted criticism of the security response.

“Faced with the threat of international terrorism we need to be much more ambitious... in terms of intelligence,” said Fenech.

The conclusions of the inquiry on the actions of security forces that night in November make dramatic reading.

When police officers arrived on 13th at the Bataclan nightclub – where more than 100 people were being held by gunmen – the officers asked a local military patrol to give them their weapons, but the military police refused.

Fenech also asked why the commander of a serious crime unit was put in charge of the operation, when the country also had a special operations force available and an elite unit specialising in counter-terrorism and hostage situations.

The six intelligence agencies currently operating in France should be merged into a single agency directly under the prime minister’s authority, the commission said.

It said all the French citizens among the attackers had been known to the authorities during their radicalisation, but the different agencies had failed to pass on the information.

One of the attackers who killed 89 people at the Bataclan concert hall, Samy Amimour, was able to travel to Syria in 2013 despite having been banned from leaving the country.

Meanwhile Said Kouachi, one of the brothers who attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, had been under surveillance in Paris but this ended when he moved to Reims in eastern France because of the “borders” between different intelligence agencies, Fenech said.

More than 7,000 servicemen remain stationed around government buildings, landmarks, schools and museums

And Amedy Coulibaly, who took hostages at a Jewish supermarket two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack, was a known extremist who had been jailed for involvement in an attempt to free a fellow Islamist.

Despite this, news of his release from prison was not passed on and no surveillance was arranged.

Merging the agencies would also make it easier for foreign nations, which sometimes did not know which body to deal with when it came to counter-terrorism, the commission said.

But it also criticised the Belgian authorities for failures over the fugitive Salah Abdeslam, a key figure in the November attacks who was stopped at the French border with Belgium the next day but released because the Belgians had not provided information about his links to militancy.

Meanwhile the continuing state of emergency imposed after the attacks was only having a “limited impact” on security, the commission found.