Paris Terror Files Reveal Missed Opportunities to Stop Attacks

[Valin]

NBC News:

Ken Dilanian, Emmanuelle Saliba, Tom Winter and Nancy Ing

July 12 2016

 

As each new detail emerged about the ISIS terrorists who killed more than 160 people in Paris and Brussels last fall, Catherine Vannier grew increasingly stunned. This is the same group of people who murdered our daughter, the resident of suburban Paris thought. How could they still be free to do this? Cécile Vannier, 17, died instantly in February 2009, when an al Qaeda terror cell set off a bomb in Cairo near her group of visiting French students; 24 others were injured.

 

Two of the suspects were soon the targets of a joint French and Belgian investigation. One of them, investigators determined, had threatened to attack the same Bataclan concert hall where 89 people were killed last November during a performance by an American band. That suspect also was closely linked to some of the extremists who later became infamous for their involvement in that terror attack.

 

For years, Catherine Vannier and other mothers had pressed authorities to make the case of her daughter's death in Cairo a priority. But despite wiretaps, surveillance, American intelligence help and the fruits of interrogations, the suspects were set free.

 

Now, that same Cairo case is part of the investigation into the Paris and Brussels terror plots. A French parliamentary report examining intelligence failures, expected to be released Tuesday, will explore some of the missed opportunities in the Cairo case, among a litany of other shortcomings, French government sources tell NBC News.

 

(Snip)