A report classified confidential in Belgium revealed the dysfunctions of the terrorist research units, in particular in their inability to detect the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. The police services were informed on several occasions and received several reports but did not never been able to link events. The files of the two sponsors were even closed.
In a confidential report by Standing Committee P, an external control body of the Belgian police which was in charge of the investigation of the three criminals in the cell who planned the Paris attacks, several glaring dysfunctions were described.
Errors of judgment, a light taking of certain edifying facts denote a glaring incompetence of the Belgian police services which had all the elements under their eyes to take seriously the profiles of three men, including two brothers, who are subsequently revealed, the sponsors of the Paris attacks.
These shortcomings and inconsistencies could be identified following the 2015 attacks which killed 130 people, when the Belgian police control body carried out an investigation into the errors made in monitoring the profiles of the people who were part of this process. terrorist cell.
The resulting report, a report classified as confidential, to which Le Monde had access in its entirety, i.e. 80 pages, shows that the Belgian police services had all the pieces of the puzzle in front of them but did not activate the means. necessary, even when they have received several reports for the same people, or when they have received a report from a foreign country in the context of anti-terrorist cooperation.
Belgium had been criticized at length for its management of this affair, in particular because the whole operation was organized from Brussels for many months and despite the custody and hearings, the reports were not pushed. But after the fact, Brussels changed its mind and ordered a thorough investigation to understand how all this affair could have escaped it, a long mea culpa of 80 pages followed.
the Standing Committee P has therefore opened an investigation to explain “the information position of the Belgian police services concerning the terrorist attacks” in Paris, how the Belgian investigation services were able to miss the terrorist threat for 18 months before attacks.
This report returns to the fore as the trial of the November 13 attacks is due to open on Wednesday, September 8. On the dock, there is only one man: Salah Abdeslam, a Franco-Moroccan of origin born in Belgium, brother of Brahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up at the Comptoir Voltaire café. While the third man, the mastermind of the operation, the Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed in an assault in Saint Denis.
The three men, childhood friends, all pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and the operation was orchestrated by this terrorist organization. Today, two reports have been made, one opened by the Belgian Federal Parliament after the attacks perpetrated at the airport and in the Brussels metro, on March 22, 2016, and that of the Committee P.
The parliamentary report published in 2017 reviewed the dysfunctions identified in the services concerned in Belgium. “The police, the prosecution service, the justice system and the intelligence services had a great deal of concrete information (…) which has not always been used. optimally and did not make it possible to identify the threat of an attack in time, ”indicates the parliamentary report, cited by Le Monde.
For the second report, which remained confidential, Committee P, which drafted it, had access to many sensitive documents including court files, classified reports, databases, emails between investigative services, some of which were classified ” very secret ”, the highest of the three Belgian confidentiality levels.
The first report was received in July 2014, when an investigator from the “Islam” cell of DR3, the anti-terrorism section of the Brussels Federal Judicial Police, received a tip from a source. His report went unheeded. The investigator received the following information: two radicalized brothers had plans to join the ranks of ISIS in Syria.
The two brothers born in Belgium have been identified, their names are Salah and Brahim Abdeslam, both lived in Molenbeek. But no report was drawn up on this report which remained oral. And it was only after the Paris attacks that the investigator in question contacted Committee P to inform about this event, reported more than a year before the attacks.
Another information was added to this file, including confirmation that the suspect left Belgium to go to Turkey (before going to Syria, editor’s note) and the Belgian federal antiterrorist police did not detect the departure of Brahim Abdeslam in Syria.
When the two brothers were interviewed, the minutes that followed did not portray them as radicalized suspects. Several reports followed one another for the three men and no follow-up was given, and the Belgian police were not able to make the link between the three men, however childhood friends.
And if some services did their job at their level, several communication errors between the different departments occurred because the information did not pass and the files of the two brothers were treated separately and then were classified,
In addition, their phones were not well searched, one of the phones even disappeared only to be found a year later and it was only after the fact that it was analyzed by more software. developed than the one originally used and, where a trace of an erased Facebook conversation showed that the suspects were genuinely ISIS members.
Another error, the Belgian federal prosecutor had decided to classify “without continuation” the two files of the Abdeslam brothers, whereas requests for investigation were not carried out. The biggest and certainly the most glaring error in this case remains when, in early July 2015, more than 4 months before the attacks of November 13, the Belgian federal police received an alarming request for a service. foreigner indicating threats of attacks perpetrated “on the occasion of mass events” by a few dozen fighters returned from Syria, with projects targeting several countries and all carried out under the coordination of the Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
This request was treated as a simple “request for information”, and “not as a potential threat for Belgium”, notes the report of Committee P and to indicate that the information of this foreign partner, that Le Monde does not not mentioned, are not subject to “any special treatment”.
These shortcomings recorded in Belgium are partly attributable to “a cruel lack of material and human resources” and should not obscure the flaws on the French side, believes Le Monde. In addition, those responsible for French internal and external intelligence had also recognized a “failure” of their services, before the French parliamentary committee.
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