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French press review 24 August 2015

The French press is in fresh overbidding over the terrorism threat facing Europe,  after Friday's foiled jihadist attack on the Amsterdam-Paris train.

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This morning’s papers are all about Friday’s foiled terrorist attack on a crowded Paris-Amsterdam train by Moroccan national Ayoub El Khazzani, who was armed with a Kalashnikov.

Le Figaro reports that the 25-year-old Khazzani was prevented from causing carnage by two off-duty US servicemen and their friend who leaped and grabbed his AK-47 gun after he shot and wounded a French-American traveller.

Le Monde says the suspect is blacklisted as a radical Islamist in three countries, including Belgium, where he is suspected to have been a member of a terrorist cell in Verviers which was dismantled in the aftermaths of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris. The Belgian daily Le Soir reports that two Islamists were shot dead and a third arrested as they were about to launch attacks in the country.

Le Monde says that if his connections with the group are established, investigators will be eager to know how a man flagged up by police in three countries as belonging to a radical group was able to acquire the weapons and board a train with an automatic pistol, a Kalashnikov with nine ammunition magazines in his luggage without being detected.

Le Figaro, wastes no time to point an accusing finger at what it considers the result of systemic failures in the anti-terrorist measures in place. It argues that Ayoub El Khazzani’s path is nothing more than that of a radicalised delinquent who like many before him succeeded to escape the glare of intelligence services.

A photograph of Khazzani is splashed across the front page of Libération. The newspaper traces his origins back to Morocco where he was born, pointing out that he plunged into delinquency in Madrid where he was radicalised in prison and in a mosque in the suburb of Algesiras. Libé learned that for months now he has been wandering from Spain to France and then to Belgium, Germany and Austria with several European intelligence services monitoring his movements without knowing where he lived.

For Liberation there are indeed questions needing answers following the foiled attack regarding security on trains, the free movement of people within the Schengen community and about the exchange of intelligence by Western allies.

The newspaper believes this is definitely the moment to bring out the Passenger Name Record, or PNR system, introduced by the Americans after the September 2011 terrorist attacks but blocked in the French parliament since 2013.

Libé explains that the system enables police and intelligence agents to have complete access to data collected by airline companies, such as passengers’ names, the method used to buy their tickets, their flight history and the weight of the luggage they carry, down to the special menus they order on board.

Several countries including Australia and the United Kingdom have been using the system for years but not France, which now intends to subscribe to the mechanism in October. But the newspaper says this will be limited to international flights to and from Europe, due to strong opposition by MEPs to what they claim is an indiscriminate collection of private data about people which will never be proportionate to the use they make of it.

L’Humanité says it expects the foiled terrorist attack to strengthen the resolve of right-wing hawks desperate to show how weak the French Socialist-led government is on security matters. The Communist party daily notes that any such claims are far fetched, underlining that there are 13,000 civil servants and contract staff assigned to anti-terrorism missions, with 5,000 in charge of homeland security, the government looking to increase the task force by 26,000 more after raising the anti-terrorism budget to more than 2 billion euros.

For La Croix, the type of terrorism currently faced by Europe is hard to prevent. The Catholic daily holds that the individuals planning to kill people they don’t even know fear neither arrest nor death. The journal believes better inter-European coordination could help curb the threat of radicalised Islamism but not eradicate it.

La Croix urges citizens facing the threat not to unleash a perverse spiral of suspicions that could lead to stigmatisation of social groups and entire communities, especially people of Arab descent or Muslims. That would be unjust and counter-productive, according to La Croix.

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