New documents leaked to the media have found two other would-be attackers – Algerian Adel Haddadi and Pakistani Muhammad Usman – also planned to unleash jihad on the French capital.
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Intelligence inputs also indicated the ISIS has stepped up efforts to infiltrate operatives into Britain to launch attacks there, another official said.
CNN reported that senior European counterterrorism sources said that Haddadi and Usman face terrorism charges. ISIS operatives dispatched back to Europe have taken advantage of encryption, especially the Telegram messenger app, to communicate securely, the official told CNN, frustrating European security services.
European security agencies also had some successes, however, including the capture of two men who meant to travel to France along with the two suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside a Paris stadium. The duo set out from Raqqa in Syria, the capital of the IS “caliphate”, six weeks before the Paris attacks. Investigators have confirmed that the use of encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp have been the key to ISIS’s terror attack plans.
After getting into Greece in a boat filled with refugees, they were intercepted by the Greek Navy.
The pair were given fake Syrian passports and smuggled into Europe using the same route refugees have been using to escape the war-torn country.
They were part of a team, investigators concluded.
On their release, Usman and Haddadihad received money arranged by Ahmed and joining the refugee trail eventually reached Salzburg, Austria, where they applied for asylum on Nov 14, a day after the Paris attacks.
Citing a trove of about 90,000 pages of documents from European investigations, CNN reported about another suspected terrorist, identified for the first time as Abid Tabaouni, who was linked to the Paris attacks and had been on the loose in Europe.
An examination of Usman’s phone by authorities showed that when not contacting terror leaders and affiliates, he was using his phone to visit about two dozen pornographic sites, including “sexxx lahur” and “Pakistani Lahore college girls”.
The documents also shed light on the ISIS devotees who are allegedly plotting attacks inside Europe where, even today, operatives await instruction from Syria. The documents, including interrogation reports, investigative findings and data pulled from cell phones offered insight into the external operations wing known as the “Amn al-Kharji”.
“ISIS is increasing its worldwide attack planning”, said CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank.
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“It’s increasingly sophisticated in the way it does this. It’s set up an intricate, logistical support system for these terrorists … to launch these terrorist attacks”. All Haddadi knew, he later told interrogators, was that they were being sent to France to do “something for the good of God”.
