French Security Services Likely to Be Questioned Over Paris Attacks

French security officials are likely to face pressure over security failure following the Paris attacks.

MOSCOW, January 10 (Sputnik) –French security services are likely to face intense pressure to explain how known jihadists managed to avoid surveillance and execute a daytime attack on a French satirical newspaper which had received threats in the past, reports The Washington Post.

The attackers, the Kouachi brothers, had been under the scrutiny of French authorities at least as early as 2005; when the younger brother, Cherif, was arrested as he tried to leave for Syria to join insurgents in Iraq. He also appeared in a French television documentary on jihadist networks.

According to French authorities, during his three years in detention, Cherif Kouachi became acquainted with another radical, Djamel Beghal, accused of planning an attack on the US Embassy in Paris. Cherif was released in 2008, reports Washington Post.

Three years later, Said Kouachi traveled to Yemen, apparently to seek training from AQAP. US counterterrorism agencies put both the brothers on their database.

Around the same time US officials were looking to determine whether the older Kouachi met with Awlaki in 2011. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American and Yemeni imam and Islamic militant. Awlaki was in charge of AQAP’s external operations and would have been highly interested in a recruit from Europe. Despite the possibility of the Kouachi meeting Awlaki, officials uncovered no evidence of such an encounter, reports Washington Post.

Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike shortly after Kouachi’s return to France, raising speculation that the cleric’s death may explain the brothers’ extended period of inactivity — that they possibly cut off communications with AQAP as part of a broader effort to maintain a lower profile.

Either way, the brothers appear to have faced low levels of scrutiny from French security services. An American official said that French intelligence and law enforcement agencies had directed surveillance on one or both of the Kouachi brothers after Saïd returned from Yemen, but later reduced that monitoring or dropped it altogether to focus on what were believed to be bigger threats, reports New York Times.

“These guys were known to be bad, and the French had tabs on them for a while, at some point, though, they allocated resources differently. They moved on to other targets,” the official told New York Times.