Changing to adapt to the era of “mass terrorism”: this is one of the main challenges faced by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) in France in recent years. A few weeks before his departure, the magistrate who heads the Pnat, Jean-François Ricard, draws up a picture of the threat in 2024 and the challenges it poses.

The one who was the first to head this specialized prosecution, created in 2019 after the wave of attacks which affected France in the mid-2010s, must soon join the cabinet of Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti, as special advisor in charge in the fight against terrorism and organized crime.

First challenge for his successor at Pnat – who has not yet been named: the Paris-2024 Olympics.

Jean-François Ricard assures him: “Everything has been organized for months, in conjunction with the judicial police services, with the intelligence services, to act as closely and as effectively as possible to prevent the carrying out of terrorist actions. on this occasion".

When it comes time to take stock, the 67-year-old magistrate, who has a 20-year career in anti-terrorism, both as a prosecutor and as an investigating judge, summarizes: "We have truly moved on to what we call terrorism of mass, to which it was necessary to respond with the law".

Existence of a “projected threat” from Central Asia

Faced with this, the Pnat has become a “formidable judging machine”, he salutes. Since its creation, 81 jihadist terrorism cases have come before the specially composed assize court, “eight times more” than between 1994 and 2019, while 260 cases have been judged before the criminal court.

"It's a complete change of scale. So much so that faced with the mountain that had to be crossed at the start of the creation of the Pnat, a certain number of us asked ourselves the question: 'are we will it succeed?'” he recalls. “And this will last, for years to come,” he predicts.

At the same time, the number of investigations is also "high", with "a little less than 700 files" in matters of terrorism, preliminary investigations and judicial information combined.

For the magistrate, the threat is multifaceted today, with "generations" and "phenomena" which "coexist, which makes reading it perhaps more complicated" than before. For the moment, "we are not (...) in the presence of a period of large-scale action".

But there is "a projected threat which is no longer completely negligible, in particular what is linked to the Islamic State of Khorasan (EI-K) with risks of projection coming from Central Asia often with relays from the North Caucasus, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan,” he says. This branch is suspected of having perpetrated the Moscow attack which left 139 dead on Friday.

Read alsoMoscow attack: Tajikistan, the weak link in Central Asia facing the jihadists

Jean-François Ricard also warns of the potential “repercussions” of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The “withdrawal periods” are also “of great use” for terrorist organizations, which take advantage of them to “reinvest areas of our territory to better ideologize them, better recruit, better think,” he explains.

A “new generation” and “veterans of jihad”

In this context, a "new generation" has appeared, alongside "jihad veterans", "very young" adults, even minors, "involved in violent action projects" and "linked above all by networks in digital form.

A 14-year-old teenager was indicted on Friday, suspected of having planned an attack against a shopping center in Lille.

A phenomenon, illustrated according to him by the Arras attack in which a professor was killed by a former student, concerns him in particular: the "absolute refusal for ideological-religious reasons of our values, of our principles, by a a certain number of people, often quite young", who reject "secularism", "freedom of expression" and feel an "absolute hatred of democracy".

Another concern for Jean-François Ricard: radicalized prisoners who leave prison. From now on, “between 70 and 80 people convicted of jihadist terrorism are released each year”.

“Our objective is to avoid abrupt outings”, in other words “to have the follow-ups most adapted to their situation and also long enough”, he explains.

Resurgence of the ultra-right

Alongside jihadist terrorism, other threats exist. First and foremost, the resurgence of the ultra-right, with around fifteen cases opened since 2017, eight of which have already been judged. On the side of the ultra-left, “the situation is not the same”. Only one case was judged at the end of 2023, in which seven people were convicted in Paris. 

The Pnat has “the desire to have an ultra-rigorous vision of the notion of terrorism”, defined by the Penal Code as an “enterprise whose purpose is to disturb public order through intimidation or terror”, assures -he. “Otherwise, it could be violent demonstrations, even very violent, it could be damage, it could be a certain form of intimidation but that is not terrorism,” declares the magistrate.

At the end of 2022, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, denounced the “ecoterrorism” of some of the anti-basin demonstrators in Sainte-Soline, in Deux-Sèvres.

“It would be a gift to these people who would be delighted to find themselves prosecuted for a qualification that they could then publicly contest before a court and who would emerge the big beneficiaries after having been prosecuted in an erroneous way,” warns Jean- François Ricard.

With AFP

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