Charlie Hebdo attack likely to spark 9/11-like review in France
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Yet French officials missed the plot.
Red flags were many. One of the men, Cherif Kouachi, had been jailed at least twice since 2005 as part of a widely reported Paris jihadist cell that funneled Islamist fighters to Iraq to battle U.S. troops there. The other, Said Kouachi, traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train alongside the group al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which by that time was known as al Qaida’s most dangerous wing.
French news reports have said Cherif Kouachi was known to have been mentored in prison by a notorious jihadist, Djamal Beghal, an Algerian-born French citizen who’d been imprisoned for a series of Paris bombings in the 1990s by the group Algerian GIA, which has since been reorganized as a branch of al Qaida in North Africa.
French officials will undoubtedly examine why those warning signs didn’t prompt action that would have prevented the attack and detected that a terrorist cell, including a third suspect, Amedy Coulibaly, had formed.
Insiders say the first answer to that question is the dysfunctional relationship between France’s external intelligence service, the Directorate General for External Security, or DGSE in its French initials, and the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, or DST, which is responsible for internal security.
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