France: Moroccan Ayoub El Qahzzani train-attacker was a returned Islamist from Syria, allowed to return
Check this out… socialists. Always think someone else has to do their work:
Train company responds to claims that staff barricaded themselves in a cabin during the attack and refused to help
The head of Thalys, the train company that ran the train on which the attempted attack took place, has responded to claims that staff refused to help.
Actor Jean-Hugues Anglade who was on board the train accused staff of barricaded themselves in their office during the altercation with the attacker, and not letting passengers in even when they were banging on the door.
Agnès Ogier, the director of Thalys, said: “The controller that was in question, he found himself under fire. He felt a bullet graze him. He took with him five or six passengers. He took them into the luggage compartment, and then he pulled the alarm.
“Mr Anglade has seen what he has seen, something very traumatising. I can only tell you what we told our agent. And the second officer walked around the train just after the shooting. All this happened very quickly. What I know to say is that the Thalys train staff fulfilled its mission.”
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French train attack: Gunman known to ‘three European intelligence services”
The man who tried to bring carnage to a high-speed train lived in Spain and France and travelled to Syria last year
AK-47 and cartridges that the Arras gunman planned to use.
By Matthew Holehouse, Brussels, and David Blair
11:41AM BST 22 Aug 2015, Telegraph
The gunman who tried to bring carnage to a high-speed train is believed to have been an Islamist extremist who travelled to Syria last year.
The 26-year-old of Moroccan origin, named in the Spanish press as Ayoub El Qahzzani, is understood to have been on the watch lists of three European intelligence services.
The gunman was taken into custody at Arras station and the French authorities have not released his name. But if he was Qahzzani, he appears to have left Morocco in 2013 and moved to Spain, where he lived for about a year.
Qahzzani then travelled to Syria in 2014, apparently to receive military training and fight in the country’s civil war. In the same year, he also tried to move to France.
France train attack heroes: Attacker ‘didn’t stand a chance’. Photo: ITN
Qahzzani boarded the high-speed train, running from Amsterdam to Paris, at Brussels Midi station, suggesting that he also spent some time living in Belgium. Along the way, he appears to have crossed the radar of the intelligence services of all the European countries where he resided.
Claude Moniquet, the chief executive of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, told the BBC that the gunman was known to Spanish, French and Belgian intelligence.
As for which terrorist group might have incited him to board the train with an armoury of weapons, Mr Moniquet said: “Given the profile of the man, given the fact that he was in Syria and given the type of action that he tried to commit, I think we can say without reasonable doubt that he is very probably linked to Islamic State [Isil].”
French forensics police officers wearing protective suits inspect the crime scene in a Thalys train of French national railway operator SNCF at the main train station in Arras. Photo: AFP/Getty
At least 350 Belgians are believed to have travelled to Syria, giving the country the dubious distinction of providing the biggest contingent of foreign fighters, relative to the size of its Muslim population.
Last week, a Belgian jihadist in Syria warned that the country faced attack. Abdellah Noumane, a man in his twenties from Antwerp who has been in Syria for two years, named “libraries, schools, hospitals, shopping centres and even nightclubs” as possible targets. “We no longer care about all the discussions regarding innocent victims. All infidels will be killed,” he said in an audio recording.
Whether this threat had any link to the events on the train is unknown. In January, Belgian police broke up a terrorist cell based in the town of Verviers, killing two men in a gun battle.
This group, known as Katiba Al-Battar, had planned a series of attacks in Vervier. The authorities will be trying to establish whether the train gunman had any links to this network.
A man is helped by paramedics after the incident. Photo: https://twitter.com/AdaSilvaArras
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