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               EU Leaders Assess Security Following Paris Attack

   by Jamie Dettmer

   In the wake of the massacre Wednesday in Paris, European security
   officials are re-visiting their plans for countering what they see as a
   growing jihadist threat and what to do with young disaffected Muslim
   men either returning from combat in the Middle East or radicalized  via
   the Internet by militant groups fighting there.

   They warn though there is no such thing as absolute security.

   While a massive manhunt continued for the two suspects - French-born
   Algerians Chérif and Saïd Kouachi - broader questions are being
   raised already over how the attack could have happened despite a robust
   intelligence and surveillance system in France.

   France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls told reporters Wednesday in the
   French capital that even with good intelligence services there is a "no
   zero risk."  He also emphasized that several terror plots had been
   thwarted in recent months.

   What is alarming, though, to security officials and analysts is how the
   Kouachi brothers managed to secure the automatic weapons, and possibly
   a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and plot the assault without
   triggering preventive action by French authorities.

   Both suspects had well-known militant histories stretching back to at
   least 2005. Chérif was convicted in 2008 in a case connected to
   jihadist recruitment of fighters against Americans in Iraq, serving 18
   months of a three-year prison sentence. And in 2010, he was arrested
   again - although not charged - for alleged involvement in a failed plot
   to help an Algerian Islamic militant escape from a French jail,
   according Le Monde newspaper.

   Analysts are asking, if French intelligence can't stop known militants
   from launching murderous attacks, how can authorities hope to counter
   threats from those who are not known yet?

   According to Claude Moniquet, director of the European Strategic and
   Intelligence Center, a Brussels think tank, an urgent task will be to
   establish whether the assailants, who were skilled with their weapons
   and tactics, had gained training and combat experience overseas. "I
   suspect they had training elsewhere, but an investigation will have to
   establish these details," he said.

   If it emerges the pair did travel to the Mideast, alarm bells will ring
   even louder.

   An estimated 1,000 French militants have either left to fight for
   jihadist groups in Syria or already returned. At least 3,000 Europeans
   are believed to have volunteered to fight with Islamic militant groups
   in Syria.

   In the summer European security ministers adopted an action plan to
   tackle the security threat they believe these fighters pose to their
   home countries.

   Some of the measures are not known but those that are aim at
   identifying militants already in Syria and those likely to enlist. The
   plan included greater intelligence-sharing procedures among European
   Union countries, according to the bloc's counter-terrorism coordinator
   Gilles de Kerchove.

   At a press conference to announce the action plan he said that not all
   of the returnees "intend to carry out attacks, but some of them will."

   In November, EU security ministers met again to discuss tightening
   security checks on their borders and the sharing of passenger records.
   But European right-to-privacy rules and European Parliament objections
   are delaying some of the surveillance measures the ministers are keen
   to implement. Security officials say they need quickly to require all
   airlines to include passenger data in a digital system, allowing
   European intelligence agencies to know the name of every person who
   enters, leaves or crosses the EU.

   The European Commission will submit new proposals to fight terrorism in
   the next few weeks, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said
   Thursday. "I know from experience that one should not react on the
   moment to such events given the risk of doing either too much or too
   little," he said. But he noted further measures were needed.

   EU states have been toughening their own national anti-terror laws. In
   a bid to curb the flow of French militants to Syria, the French
   government introduced legislation a few months ago making it easier to
   detain suspects at airports and to confiscate their passports.

   European governments have increased their intelligence endeavors by
   working with Muslim communities and mosque leaders to discourage
   recruits from heading out and by monitoring social media sites in an
   effort to identify those who have gone to join militant fighters in the
   Middle East.

   Last year, the then counterterrorism chief of London's Metropolitan
   Police appealed to Muslims across the UK to help stanch the flow of
   young Britons heading to Syria. At least 500 British Muslims are
   thought to have gone to Syria. Commander Richard Walton admitted that
   authorities are "desperate" to obtain further assistance.

   Britain's interior minister Theresa May Thursday chaired an emergency
   meeting of the British government's COBRA security committee to review
   what had happened in France and to decide whether there needed to be
   any changes in UK security plans. The panel ordered a ramping up of
   border security. "Following the attacks we took the precautionary step
   of increasing security at the French-UK border," she told reporters in
   London.

   And British politicians appealed for Muslim communities to be more
   vigilant for jihadist outliers. But critics warn there are risks in
   targeting local Muslim communities and making them feel under pressure
   to collaborate with authorities. The effort can come off as
   discrimination, further alienating young and disaffected Muslims and
   presenting recruitment opportunities for militants.

   In the UK, police have been aggressively using counter-terrorism
   legislation to detain and question anyone, even without reasonable
   cause for suspicion. More than 60,000 people were detained for up to
   nine hours in 2012 and 2013 but all those stops and interrogations
   resulted in just 24 terrorism-related arrests.

   Asim Qureshi, research director of CagePrisoners, a civil libertarian
   campaigning group, says the approach is too intrusive. He told the Al
   Jazeera news network, "For example, they get asked, `what type of
   Muslim are you? What are your foreign policy opinions? What are your
   views on Palestine?' None of those questions pertain to whether that
   person poses a credible risk to UK security."

   European leaders and their advisers have also been delving into the
   question of what to do with fighters who have returned from the Middle
   East. Should they be arrested and prosecuted for fighting in a foreign
   war, if there are laws available to do so? Is it better to monitor
   returnees, rather than risk further radicalization in jail? Should
   returnees be required to go through de-radicalization programs? None of
   the individual states of the bloc have found answers to those
   questions, so an EU consensus remains far off.

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   aris-attack/2590713.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/eu-leaders-asses-security-following-paris-attack/2590713.html