How did the police investigate the Thalys attack?

Reconstruction of the foiled attack in August 2015 in a Thalys Amsterdam-Paris train -

• Four men, involved in the attack on a Thalys connecting Paris to Amsterdam in August 2015, appear before the special assize court.

  Two people were injured.

• Ayoub El-Khazzani, who opened fire inside the train, responds to "attempted assassinations in connection with a terrorist enterprise" and "criminal terrorist association".

  This Moroccan citizen, then 26 years old, was acting on the instruction of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, coordinator of the terrorist cell that struck France and Belgium in 2015 and 2016.

• On the third day of the trial, a police commissioner came to detail the work of investigators from the anti-terrorism sub-directorate of the judicial police.

“We realized that he was a link in an organized network projected from Syria to reach France.

"Black dress, short hair and glasses on her nose, this commissioner who was at the head of the" investigations "pole of the anti-terrorism sub-directorate of the judicial police takes her notes placed on the desk.

She immerses herself in it and goes back five years.

One evening in August 2015, she was warned that a man armed with a Kalashnikov and a pistol had burst into a Thalys connecting Amsterdam to Paris, before being overpowered by passengers.

In just under three hours, she mobilizes her team and goes to Arras, where the train has come to a stop.

Some 342 passengers were gathered in a communal room, not far from the station.

You have to question them, check that some are not known to the police.

A colossal job.

The suspect is silent to him at the time of his arrest.

He only gives a name and a date of birth to the officers of the local police station: Ayoub El-Khazzani, born September 3, 1989.

"It was not very credible ..."

Five years later, the 31-year-old Moroccan jihadist is tried by the special assize court in Paris.

Investigations revealed that after a stay in Syria, this man with long hair and thick beard had reached Europe in the company of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the November 13 attacks, who had asked him to commit an attack.

Today, he assures that he had boarded the train with all these weapons only to attack the American soldiers who were on board.

A project that he would have given up at the last moment.

But at the time, when he was taken into custody, he put forward a different explanation.

The weapons were allegedly discovered in a park in Brussels.

He would then have liked to use them to commit a robbery in the Thalys.

"It was not very credible," continues the commissioner.

When confronted with "his contradictions", he stood up and asserted his right to remain silent.

Sdat investigators were, in fact, quickly convinced that they were facing a terrorist.

The exploitation of his Samsung phone in particular gave them some clues as to his true intentions.

"We quickly realized that he was someone seasoned in anonymization techniques", continues the police officer, specifying that the device was "devoid of any data".

In reality, "it began its existence on the day of the facts".

Known to foreign services

He had used the phone before boarding the train to create an email address and reach three numbers.

Before opening fire in the Thalys, he had used it to search for

, that is to say "religious songs which urge the jihadists to fight", summarizes the commissioner whose name, for reasons security, was not given by the court.

Investigators then manage to obtain the credentials of his Facebook account he had created in 2010. For four years, he had hardly used it.

But in 2014, the young man began to post regularly "videos and images promoting radical Islam".

Some of them showed "a man with his hands cut off after stealing".

El-Khazzani did not hesitate to extol "the virtues of death as a martyr", to present "France as a terrorist state", to denigrate women.

"International cooperation in this case was decisive," said the policewoman, who testified for four hours.

Having learned that he had lived in Spain, investigators turned to the Spanish liaison officer assigned to Sdat.

He told them that El-Khazzani had stood out there with his brother, who was "a pro jihad preacher".

He was also known in this country for drug trafficking.

A "dense" investigation

The Belgian police, with whom they formed a joint investigation team, informed them that he had been known across Quévrain for radicalization since 2012. A search was carried out at his sister's home, in Molenbeek, where El -Khazzani lived from May 2014

He left Belgium in May 2015 to go to Turkey, via Berlin, then to Syria.

He then joined Greece under a false identity, in the company of Abdelhamid Abaaoud whose DNA was found on one of the chargers of his Kalashnikov, one of the "privileged weapons of jihadist fighters", notes the commissioner who spent five years at Sdat before joining another service in the central direction of the judicial police.

On August 25, 2015, he was indicted.

Before resuming her notes, this specialist in terrorism and radical Islam delivers her conviction to the court.

On August 21, 2015, “I think we escaped the worst”.

Before leaving, she apologizes: “I was a bit long but the investigation was dense.

The trial is scheduled to last until December 17.

He faces life imprisonment.

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• Society

• Justice

• Federal police

• Police

• Attack

• Daesh

• Abdelhamid Abaaoud

• Terrorism

• Attack in a Thalys

• Ayoub El Khazzani