Surveillance of brothers behind Charlie Hebdo shooting called off six months ago

POLICE surveillance of the brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo shootings was called off just six months ago because they were deemed low risk.

Suspect's Wanted In Connection With Attack At The Satirical Weekly Charlie Hebdo

POLICE surveillance of the brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo shootings was called off just six months before the attacks, it has emerged.

Cherif and Said Kouachi were closely monitored via internet, telephone and in person between 2009 and July last year, Le Parisien reported.

The operation was beefed up in 2011, when Said returned from his trip to Yemen, which is reportedly when he met with al-Qaeda extremists to complete his jihadist training.

But tragically for the victims and their loved ones, the pair were judged low risk, and the surveillance was called off.

Third gunman Amedi Coulibaly, pictured with girlfriend Hayat Boumeddiene, was also known to police.

Both brothers were on the US no-fly list, according to a senior US official, and Cherif had been convicted on terrorism charges.

The third gunmen involved in this week’s sieges, Amedi Coulibaly, was also known to security forces.

A judicial source told Le Parisien that authorities decided to refocus their efforts on “proven risks” after no evidence of the brothers engaging in radical Islamist activity was found.

The news raises questions over holes in counter-terrorist operations around the world.

Martin Place gunman Man Horan Monis was also a familiar figure to authorities, and the two radical Islamists who killed soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 were on the radar of police in London.

The 26-year-old is thought to be dangerous.

Boumeddiene is on the run.

The list of suspected radicals released from prison or returned from overseas is growing ever longer, and security forces lack the resources to monitor all of them.

In France alone, it is thought the list of surveillance targets may now stretch into the thousands.

“Overwhelmed? Yes indeed, we are,” said a French anti-terrorist official on Saturday.

“How can it be done? We are going to work 20 hours a day instead of 15, but that won’t be enough. So we prioritise at the risk of making an error.”

He said it was impossible to assign a police officer to each suspect, and that monitoring had to rely heavily on phone and internet surveillance.

Distraught members of the public, in France and across the world, want to know how future tragedies can be avoided.

France’s intelligence agencies list suspects by order of the supposed danger they represent, with the most serious monitored around-the-clock.

“If France agrees to have 40,000 people for the intelligence services, we will do it. Otherwise, it is going to be difficult,” the official said.

The country’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, includes less than 4000 agents; the external agency, the DGSE, has around 5000.

France’s prime minister on Friday acknowledged “failings” in intelligence that led to the three-day killing spree, as criticism mounted.

France’s Police labour union have called the attacks a “breakdown” in security.

Even as authorities were still investigating events, debate raged over who should be held accountable in the apparent lapses by law enforcement and security officials.

But some experts said security services are drowning in data, overwhelmed by the quantity of people they are expected to track, and constrained by an inability to make pre-emptive arrests in democratic countries.

“There was a failing, of course,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on BFM television. “That’s why we have to analyse what happened.”

Michel Thooris, secretary-general of the France Police labour union, called the French attack a “breakdown” in security.

The outpouring of grief in Paris is harrowingly similar to the recent tributes made in Sydney.

Somewhere along the line the suspects fell through the cracks, he said, with either the judicial system not sentencing them strongly enough, or a failure in police surveillance.

“This was a military strike against civilians by individuals at war, in a country at peace.”

Thooris criticised authorities for not doing more to warn the public to stay away from sensitive sites after the suspects went on the run, and said “lax” French regulations allowed terrorism to be imported from war zones abroad.

“The current policy of blocking French citizens from travelling abroad to wage jihad by letting them run free is absurd,” he said. “If they can’t go fight in Syria or Iraq, they’ll fight here in France.”

The French government admits to “failings” in its counter-terrorism operations.