Shortly before the attack on the office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a Twitter user, believed to be an Islamic State group fighter in Syria, tweeted a curt and cryptic message that read: “Snail eaters.”
Soon after the murders of 10 staff and their associates, as well as two police officers, the same Twitter user — whose account linked to ones used by British jihadists fighting in Syria and speeches by radical Islamic clerics Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri — posted a news report about the massacre.
Minutes later, the account boasted: “You heard it here first. #SnailEaters ate lead.”
It looks increasingly likely that others beyond the three dead terrorists were aware of the forthcoming attacks in Paris. French media have reported that the Algerian secret services warned Paris on Tuesday last week that a terrorist attack on their soil was imminent.
However, the stark question facing the French security services now is: If they were aware that something was coming, did they have any idea how it would look or who would be behind it? Also, there is a wider question: Do security services in potential target nations have enough resources of the right kind to anticipate and deal with the threats they face?
Certainly, the three attackers were not “clean skins,” rogue terrorists unknown to the authorities. Rather, they were all too familiar to them. All three had well-documented ties to extremist networks and Islamic preachers, and their journeys to radicalization had been keenly mapped by the legal system.
“These guys were known to be bad, and the French had tabs on them for a while,” a US official speaking anonymously to the New York Times said of the two Kouachi brothers. “At some point, though, they allocated resources differently. They moved on to other targets.”
At the end of a week in which French counterterrorism police won praise for bringing two simultaneous hostage situations to an end, exactly how that key decision to “move on” was reached is the source of anguished soul-searching in France as attention turns to whether the attacks could have been prevented.
Speaking on French television on Friday night, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls appeared to capture the mood of many in his nation.
“There is a clear failing,” Valls said. “When 17 people die, it means there were cracks.”
Cherif Kouachi, one of the brothers blamed for the attack on Charlie Hebdo, had a terrorism-related conviction in 2008 for his ties to the Buttes-Chaumont network.
After his time in prison, where he was further radicalized by another preacher, Djamel Beghal, who was serving a 10-year sentence for a failed plot to attack the US embassy in Paris in 2001, Cherif became closed-off and unresponsive and started growing a beard, his former attorney, Vincent Ollivier, told Le Parisien.
His brother, Said, is known to have visited Yemen where he is believed to have met the US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the senior al-Qaeda operative in Yemen who was killed by a US drone strike in September 2011.
Amedy Coulibaly, the attacker who seized hostages in the kosher supermarket in eastern Paris, killing four of them, also boasted a well-documented hatred of the West.
Yesterday, French radio station RTL released audio in which Coulibaly attacked Western military campaigns against extremists in Syria and Mali, and described Osama bin Laden as an inspiration.
In 2013, Coulibaly was sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in the escape from prison of Ait Ali Belkacem, a radical Muslim and former member of the Algerian GIA who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the attack on the Train Museum of Orsay in 1995, which killed eight people. Cherif Kouachi had also been arrested in connection with the Orsay attack.
Given the Kouachi brothers’ extensive involvement in radical Islamic circles, it is unsurprising that both the French and US spy agencies had classified them as “very high” priority terrorist suspects. Their names were entered into a database of 1.2 million individuals whom the US considers to be terrorist suspects. They were also on the smaller “no fly” list barring them from boarding flights to or in the US.
However, more recently there are suggestions that the French authorities had scaled back the monitoring of the Kouachis as the brothers kept a low profile, perhaps consciously avoiding contact with others whom they knew to be under surveillance.
The US official said that French intelligence and law enforcement agencies had conducted surveillance on one or both of the Kouachis, but this had been reduced or perhaps dropped as they sought to focus on what they believed were bigger threats.
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