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France - Syria - Turkey

Red-faced French government promises inquiry into jihadist suspect gaffe

The French government has ordered an investigation into how three suspected jihadis managed to walk off a plane in Marseille without being detained, even though they had already been arrested in Turkey. Opposition MPs say the incident has made France a laughing stock.

Not laughing - French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
Not laughing - French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. Reuters/Benoît Tessier
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The three men - Imad Djebali, Gael Maurize, and Abdelouahed Baghdali, the husband of Toulouse killer Mohammed Merah’s sister, Souad – gave themselves up on Wednesday morning after spending the night at liberty.

They were happy to be back in France after realising that the reasons they went to Syria “were not necessarily good ones”, according to Maurize’s lawyer, Apollinaire Legros-Gimbert.

They had been amazed to arrive in Marseille from Turkey on Tuesday evening and not be met by police, who were waiting for them in Paris.

The French interior ministry blamed Turkish police for not notifying them that the pilot of the Paris-bound plane had refused to take the detainees for administrative reasons and that they had been sent to Marseille.

But police sources told the AFP news agency that a note had been sent to border police but arrived at Marseille an hour late.

Although the three had been on security service files for some time, they managed to walk through passport control, since a security data bank was out of order at the time.

Claiming that France was the “laughing stock of the world”, MPs from the opposition UMP laid into the Socialist government.

"So we can send planes to Iraq but we can't control our own borders?" said former minister Christian Estrosi, while the far-right Front National slammed the government’s “extraordinary amateurism”.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve hit back with the accusation that the criticisms were “excessive” and “politically motivated” and said that he had asked the police to launch an internal inquiry, whose findings would be reported to parliament “as soon as possible”.
 

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