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French Police Accidentally Foil Attack on Churches
Not the kind of story that fills me with confidence. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced this morning that last Sunday, the police accidentally foiled an attack against “one or two” churches in the Paris suburb of Villejuif. The presumptive terrorist, who has been arrested and taken into custody, is suspected of murdering a fitness instructor who was found dead in her car on Sunday in the same suburb.
According to Le Monde, the 24-year-old Algerian computer science student came here under France’s family reunification program. Police discovered the plot because–and only because–he shot himself and then called the French equivalent of 911.
It began with a routine call to the emergency services on Sunday morning: A man was wounded in the streets of the 13th arrondissement of Paris (a short walking distance from my apartment). He claimed he had been attacked in a robbery. The ambulance service found him on the pavement, bleeding heavily from a bullet wound to the leg, and called the police. The cops followed the trail of blood to a nearby parked car and found an arsenal inside: four “Kalashnikov-style” weapons (according to the Guardian), bullet-proof vests, a stolen Sig-Sauer police pistol, several police armbands and the detailed plans of several Parisian police stations. Le Monde reports that they found “a handgun, body armor, ammunition,” and a flashing police light.
At the hospital, the injured man admitted that he was the vehicle’s owner. Upon searching his apartment in the 13th arrondissement, the police discovered documents “establishing clearly that the individual planned to carry out an attack, presumably against one or two churches,” said Cazeneuve. (According to Figaro, citing the news channel M6, these “documents” were posts on Facebook.) Police have now arrested members of his family, of whom “several members are radical Islamists,” says Figaro.
Here’s the part that’s mind-boggling. The interior minister said that the intelligence services had been aware of the man since 2014, when he “made enquiries” about joining the jihad in Syria. They’d been tapping his phone and e-mail. He was under “S type”–unobtrusive–police surveillance.
Le Monde reports that he disappeared for a week in Turkey earlier this year and was taken into custody upon his return. After analyzing the surveillance data, the police determined that it was insufficient to justify a criminal investigation. And then … they released him.
His DNA was apparently found all over the car of 32-year-old Pilates instructor Aurélie Châtelain, who was found dead on Sunday in in the passenger seat of her car, shot three times.
Why did he shoot himself in the leg? No one knows.
“Our vigilance and determination are total,” said Cazeneuve.
Published in General
What more could they have done? Get more information to analyze?
You know as much as I do. I assume we’ll learn more in the coming days.
Have they apologized yet?
Is the name “Villejuif” just a coincidence?
Yes. It comes from “villa of Juvius.”
My guess would be he was putting a pistol back in his pocket having forgotten to set the safety (or relying too much on the safety).
Trigger gets caught on something. BANG! Oh, crap! Now I have a bullet wound in my leg. How do I explain that? Oooh! I’ll tell them I got shot while being robbed.
The ambulance service arrives, looks at the wound, concludes it was self-inflicted (not necessarily intentionally), decides his story smells, and calls the cops. Story unravels from there.
I might be wrong, but it’s a simple explanation.
Seawriter
FIFY
Maybe they should give “partial” a try.
What was the point of keeping him under surveillance if you weren’t going to do anything to stop him?
Only Slovaks and people still stuck in middle 18th century still admire French. (Only joking, Slovak friends.) I think people want to wear Louis-wigs and fancy clothes. Only reason I can think of.
No idea. The story just broke this morning, so I’m sure we’ll be learning more about this. They may well have so many people under surveillance at this point that they can’t analyze all the data properly.
Seriously, it is now habit of many countries in Europe to learn much and do nothing. Everything that would happen in Balkans was known by French and others before it happened, but they did nothing until too late. World will never know what history was destroyed forever in last Balkan war when churches and mosques were blown up and burnt. I don’t blame America for this. Or NATO. It was internal European matter.
Sometimes police work, or solving a crime comes from a lucky break. In the case of someone like this idiot I would hope the gendarmerie realizes their good fortune and then realize that their luck will run out some day. Luck has nothing to do with examining why and how this person who was on their radar managed to acquire an arsenal and was planning attacks. An internal investigation needs to focus on their intelligence failure.
Agree. This is twice in three months.
I propose a new strategy. If you suspect them of being a crazy jihadist and they go abroad to area adjacent to ISIS or AQ territory. you bring them in for some questioning just to rattle them up a bit and see if they slip. This idiot sounds like he wasn’t to good at the whole keeping quite thing when actually questioned. This way you can at least pick the low hanging fruit and scare off any of the less than committed.
It also seems he was acquiring the means to impersonate one or more police officers, which is very weird. Stolen police service weapon, too?
Claire,
Once again the fantasy that Jihad is about economic opportunity is revealed. This person was educated and employed in a growth industry. He was highly sophisticated in his personal abilities to procure the means of committing acts of terror. Rather than the feverish act of a psychotic we see the careful planning and ideological expression of a fanatic. Seawriters account of what took place to ruin his plan seems quite plausible.
I should think that the French might give Gd proper the credit for saving many lives. Someone like this on a single day with the weapons he had could have murdered and maimed 10..20..100 innocent people easily.
Of course, one young women is dead. I am just guessing but I suspect her only crime was too great a willingness to ignore the signals and believe in the media myth of the oppressed Jihadist.
Regards,
Jim
I can tell you from experience that sometimes police work can be boring. The smart officers read through the district incident reports because they might recognize someone they have arrested before based upon how a crime was committed. I’ve paid a visit to individuals that I recognized from another officer’s report. Sometimes I would get an admission and sometimes I wouldn’t. When I didn’t get an admission I would simply say; I just wanted to let you know that I’m thinking about you, maybe I’ll stop by again on another night.
Perhaps the gendarmerie are stretched too thin and perhaps there are politically correct problems in France. Even so some regular visits and off the record conversations can still yield results.
Inspector Clouseau lives. The man shot himself during the murder ( because she fought ) and had a plan to pawn his injury off on an attacker who also did in the Pilates instructor.
This case is little different from the US handling of the older Tsarnev brother in terms of bungling a serious threat.
They called the cops because by law any injury inflicted with a weapon results in a call to the cops. As for how he shot himself–your theory sounds as plausible as any.
More from the 4:00 pm press conference: Our terrorist’s name is Sid Ahmed Ghlam, and he appears to be connected to ISIS. He’s invoking his right to silence. His classmates are surprised, say he was a normal student.
Christians here are wondering why synagogues are better-protected than churches.
Christians are really wondering? Have they not been paying attention? That said, ISIS has specialized in more theatrically anti-Christian gestures recently. So maybe start posting guards.
Kind of suspicious yet another terrorist incident goes down in close proximity to Claire, though… I expect Inspector Clouseau to arrive on her doorstep soon…
So, it seems between 3,000 and 5,000 people are under surveillance in France and considered to be “dangerous.” Police say that monitoring them all around the clock would be “impossible.” (This is of course absolute rubbish: Turkey manages to monitor twice as many journalists alone around the clock–you never hear them complaining that it’s “impossible.”)
Instead of wasting resources monitoring such people, just deport them.
To where?
That’s their problem.
German authorities have said it takes about 60 people to monitor every suspicious immigrant they have on their radar. Considering the untold millions Americans spend monitoring Somalis in Minneapolis I’m sure we have at least that amount of personnel required as well. The young man’s family should have been forcibly reunited in Algeria if they wanted to be together after the first incident occurred.
Claire,
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We could remove the need to sit patiently waiting for the Jihadists to “do something” if we criminalized Jihad directly. Jihad is a conspiracy to commit murder, sedition, and subversion by its own self description. Why not accept their claims as truth and prosecute them for it.
Regards,
Jim
They would. French law more than permits them to prosecute for this. They can prosecute them the second they express the intention, so long as they can persuade a judge that it was serious–and I suspect that’s not at all hard to do. They put quite a number of people behind bars just for saying that they approved of Coulibaly.
The problem–as far as I can guess; obviously I’m not privy to the details of French intelligence gathering–is that they don’t seem to be able to catch the guys saying, “Hey, I intend to join the jihad,” or, “I think jihad’s for me,” or something concrete like that. I assume they’re mostly sophisticated enough to keep this sentiment off the phone/away from the computer. The shocking thing about this story is that he does seem to have said just–that and they didn’t pick him up or keep him under round-the-clock surveillance. This clearly indicates completely overstretched police resources. And in fact, this has been widely reported: the cops are exhausted.
As for deporting them: not if they’re French citizens, they can’t, unless the proposal is to take them out over the sea in a helicopter and drop them into it–which is a bit too Argentine even for my taste. No one has a pro-jihad immigration policy. I’d much prefer to see them safely locked up than deported anywhere, seeing as there’s no country in the world that benefits from an extra jihadi.
Why would it take 60 people? Even assuming 24-hour heavy surveillance, I can’t imagine it would take more than 24–say, three shifts of eight people. This is assuming the kind of surveillance you’d put on a professional who knows what he’s doing, which this guy obviously wasn’t. And it seems to me this guy should have been noticed with a lot less than that: somehow he managed to acquire a lot of weapons that are not that common in Paris–as well as police gear. (The plan to impersonate the police is a particularly disturbing aspect of this story.) And was placing a lot of calls to Syria, which is something you’d think would light up the switchboard.