ON DECRYPT
If the terrorist trail is confirmed, the shock will be all the greater for the police after the knife attack that killed four people Thursday in the Prefecture of Police in Paris. On Friday evening, the national antiterrorist prosecutor's office seized the investigation into the attacker, a computer scientist from the Parisian Intelligence Directorate (DRPP), employed since 2003. The hypothesis of the terrorist act now invites one to ask : how could the potential radicalization of this administrative agent, who would have converted to Islam 18 months ago, have gone unnoticed in one of the most sensitive services of the police?
"The notion of failure ... I would relativize it, we are not in a totalitarian state where we constantly scan the lives of people," responded to the microphone of Europe 1 Jean-Paul Mégret, deputy secretary general of the independent union commissioners, who is himself stationed at the Prefecture of Police of Paris. "In a country like France, there are a number of rights that do not allow you to know everything, even about an official working in the intelligence community." I recall that he was an administrative officer, initially responsible computer science."
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"There was a mistrust that diminished"
The killer was given a "defense secret" clearance to intervene on all DRPP computer stations, even those containing sensitive data. To have this kind of clearance, an extremely thorough investigation is conducted, but there is no continuous monitoring of all agents. Behavioral discrepancies may give rise to particular vigilance, but the actual initiation of an investigation is only done if the head of department has a doubt and seizes the IGPN, the police of the policies.
"There was a mistrust that diminished because he was a long-time service worker, and when you've been in a service for a long time, you're not scanned the same way as when you you enter a police school or a sensitive service ", explains Jean-Paul Mégret.
"Identify the flaws and be better"
The flaw regarding Thursday's tragedy can be explained by the context, perhaps a form of positive discrimination: the assailant was a reserved bureaucrat, hard of hearing, with difficulties to express himself and also to evolve. He had been working there for 16 years. In short, the computer specialist that everyone knows, crosses, but without really paying attention to him. "Behind, it will lead us to make continuous detection to try to identify the people already present in our services," concedes our trade unionist.
Especially since there was still an alert in 2015: the suspect had made remarks deemed inappropriate after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which earned him a call to order by his superiors. "We have to use what has happened to identify the flaws and be better, we have the right to make terrible mistakes like this one time, but we have to use them," concludes Jean-Paul. Mégret.