ISIS in the POLICE: French security agency INFECTED with jihadis amid fresh attack fears
This story has reached the English press now. This is the Express; the original report was in Le Parisien.
POLICE forces in France are riddled with radicalised officers, including some who have broadcast Muslim chants while on patrol or refused to protect synagogues, a leaked memo reportedly shows.
France is said to house thousands of radical Islamists and authorities are now witnessing a worrying rise in security staff inciting terrorism or professing allegiance to extremist groups.
According to the memo, 17 officers were lured to the jihadi cause between 2012 and 2015, with reports of at least one refusing to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the victims of a terrorist attack.
In another case, a French policewoman referred to her uniform as a “filthy rag of the Republic” in a post on Facebook.
Around a third of the radicalised officers were women and all of the cases involved junior members of staff, the report said. It is not their junior rank that is significant – but that they have only joined in the last few years. The late 2000s according to Le Parisien. Some will be converts or radicalised only recently; others may be ‘sleepers’. And I don’t imagine that France is immune from diversity considerations – if the French police is anything like the English service these junior officers will be rising rapidly and will have greater security against budget cuts than their indigenous colleagues.
The Paris police headquarters is now planning weekly review of officers’ behaviour in a bid to spot the first signs of extremism, including monitoring changes in clothing, sick leave or theft of supplies.
Thibaut de Montbrial, a counter-terrorism specialist and head of the Centre for Internal Security Studies, told French newspaper Le Figaro: “Having agents of security forces attack their colleagues. Someone in uniform attacks another person, wearing the same uniform. In France, such a scenario is not impossible. Security forces must keep this risk in mind.”
The French army is also concerned about a rise in young recruits showing signs of radicalisation.
Last week a retired French soldier was arrested after landing in Morocco with a suitcase packed with kitchen knives, a machete and a gas cylinder. Manuel Broustail, a military veteran who converted to Islam, had been under surveillance by French security agencies since he was discharged in 2014. Broustail had previously been placed under house arrest in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks.