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PARIS (Reuters) – The teenager identified by prosecutors as Abdoulakh A. lived with his family and had never appeared on the radar of French intelligence agencies. But he lunged at them in a horrible way Friday night when he beheaded a school teacher in broad daylight.
The 18-year-old had a history of juvenile delinquency, but was too young for the police to have created a file on him. He lived in a Chechen community that the intelligence services do not understand well.
He used a knife to behead the high school history teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad to his students in a class on free speech. Police shot him dead minutes after the attack in a Paris suburb.
The attacker’s profile, as recounted by law enforcement officials, illustrates the difficulties law enforcement agencies face in identifying potential attackers who are often exposed to extreme ideologies on the Internet and whose contacts with other Islamist militants , if they have them, they may have had. been purely virtual.
The government says that some 20,000 people in France are on the intelligence agencies’ “Fiche S”, a watch list of people who pose a risk to the country’s security. Only a small number of them are under active surveillance.
Abdoulakh A. was not on the list at all, law enforcement sources said.
This is not the first time intelligence services have been taken by surprise.
The 25-year-old Pakistani who wounded two people last month in a meat picking attack outside the former Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which published cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad, was not on Fiche S.
Neither was the Paris police IT worker who killed four colleagues with knives a year earlier.
OPAQUE COMMUNITY
Abdoulakh A., born in Russia and of Chechen origin, lived in the city of Evreux northwest of Paris, according to authorities. On Friday night, police arrested his parents, younger brother and a grandfather, a judicial source said, wanting to establish what they knew of his plans and whether he had accomplices.
Some Islamist militants in Western countries have been characterized as “lone wolf” attackers. However, counterterrorism experts say it is rare for attackers to actually act alone, even if they do not physically know their accomplices.
The challenge for security services has been to take advantage of the networks that groom Islamist attackers, both by building stronger relationships with Muslim communities and by infiltrating jihadist social media accounts.
They have had some success doing so with the French community in North Africa, which has been in the country for many generations. But the Chechen community is more opaque, with most of its members arriving after the mid-1990s.
“We don’t know too much what is happening in the Chechen diaspora,” said Asiem El Difraoui, a political analyst and specialist on jihadism. “There are not many people in the intelligence services who understand the language and there is a shortage of translators.”
Mairbek Vachagaev, a Chechen émigré living in Paris who runs a newsletter for the Chechen community, wrote on the Telegram messaging service after Friday’s murder: “I am sure that the entire Chechen diaspora of 67,000 in France is shocked by what happened. “
(Reporting by Tangi Salaun; written by Richard Lough; edited by Pravin Char)
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