New details have emerged about urgent warnings of Bilal Hadfi’s radicalization after the youngest of the Paris terrorist attackers openly cheered the January attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and posted extremist messages on Facebook.
The messages showed that the baby-faced 20-year-old’s attention had drifted from soccer, cigarettes and girls to the messages of extremist Islam.
Hadfi was a French citizen living in Brussels who went to Syria early this year to fight for the Islamic State.
Photo: AFP
The Belgian government issued an arrest warrant for him, but then lost track of him.
On Nov. 13, Hadfi blew himself up outside the Stade de France on the northern outskirts of Paris, part of attacks that killed 130 people.
On Saturday, Belgian newspaper De Morgen reported that a police oversight body, known as Committee P, is investigating why the warnings were not passed on to authorities.
In an April 27 e-mail, Chris Pijpen, the director of Hadfi’s school, told an education official, Charles Huygens, that Hadfi had not attended school since Feb. 24.
Officials met with Hadfi’s mother and aunt on March 23.
The women said Hadfi had left for Morocco, where he had relatives, because he was “fed up” with school.
However, the school was rife with rumors that Hadfi had left for Syria, the e-mail said.
It included images from Hadfi’s Facebook page, where he had adopted a nom de guerre, Abu Moudjahid al-Belgiki — the surname means “of Belgium” — and posed with a militant flag.
The e-mail was reported by De Morgen and then provided to the New York Times.
Huygens did not alert the police.
“It’s true that the director told me by mail in April that our student had departed to Syria, but by then it was already too late,” Huygens told De Morgen.
Pijpen said he did not contact the authorities himself because protocol required that he go through his superiors.
Belgian law requires that schools report suspicions of terrorist activity to authorities.
In a telephone interview Saturday, Pijpen said he never got a reply to his e-mail.
“I expected that something would happen, some further action, at least someone from the administration that would come down to our school, or the police,” he said. “I was amazed that nothing happened. This was already after Charlie Hebdo and Verviers,” a Belgian town where police in January killed two men suspected of links to a terrorist network plotting an attack.
As early as February last year, officials said that Hadfi was having trouble at home in the Neder-over-Heembeek section of Brussels, where he lived with his mother and two brothers, a school report provided to the Times said.
He had been distraught after the death of his father a few years earlier and a brother reported that Hadfi started smoking marijuana and skipping classes and that he would “hang out with the wrong friends.”
A few days after the Paris attacks, Sara Stacino, a former teacher of Hadfi’s, said in a phone interview that the school had prepared reports on Hadfi’s radicalization, but that the reports were not passed on.
She has left the school.
A short while later, Huygens suspended Pijpen, ostensibly for showing up late to a meeting.
Pijpen said he was being scapegoated for his superiors’ failure to act.
“The administration wanted to cover this up so they can move on,” he said.
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