French inquiry recommends Intelligence overhaul after attacks

TIL Desk/World/Paris-A French inquiry into the terror attacks that rocked Paris in 2015 today recommended the fusion of the country’s intelligence services after the “global failure” of the country’s myriad agencies. The parliamentary inquiry was set up in February to probe possible security failings in the run-up to two major terror attacks in Paris in 2015 that left 147 people dead.

“The two big intelligence bosses admitted during their hearings that the 2015 attacks represent a ‘global intelligence failure’,” said Socialist lawmaker Sebastien Pietrasanta. The president of the commission of the inquiry, Georges Fenech, said that the barriers between different intelligence services led to the surveillance of Charlie Hebdo attacker Said Kouachi being lifted. The next time he was heard of was when he and his brother Cherif attacked the satirical weekly in Paris on January 7, killing 12 people.

Amedy Coulibaly, an ally of the brothers who took shoppers hostage at a Jewish supermarket two days later, killing four, and who also shot dead a policewoman, was also an example of intelligence failings within the prison system, the inquiry found. Fenech recommended the establishment of a single “national anti-terrorism agency.”  “Faced with the threat of international terrorism we need to be much more ambitious… in terms of intelligence,” he said.