European prisons are incubators of terror

Islamic State uses European prisons for radicalisation and recruitment.

Paris is sunny, but tourists are staying away due to terror attacks.

After his capture in Belgium, Paris terror suspect Salah Abdeslam was transferred to a prison cell in France where the paint on the walls was still fresh.

Prison staff had spent three weeks renovating the space, bolting down furniture and installing video cameras to make sure the 26-year-old’s solitary confinement went smoothly, says Marcel Duredon, a guard at Fleury-Merogis, the high-security facility on the outskirts of Paris.

Still, the measures did little to calm the ruckus that erupted in the cell blocks as dusk fell and word spread about the prison’s newest inmate, the last surviving suspect in the November 13 attacks.

“Some welcomed him as the messiah,” Duredon says.

The rise of Islamic State has caught Europe’s prison systems flat-footed. Convicted terrorists, some of whom serve prison terms as brief as two years, sit atop the social pecking order in facilities like Fleury-Merogis.

Many use jail to forge ties with petty criminals from the predominantly Muslim suburbs that ring European cities, authorities say, grooming them for jihad missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria — or attacks at home.

Now the return over the past year of an unprecedented number of jihadists from Islamic State territory is placing European prisons in an even bigger bind. To keep militants off the streets, authorities throw many of them in jail, but that is injecting battle-hardened radicals into overcrowded prisons.

Between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the roughly 67,000 inmates in the French prison system are Muslims, researchers say. They represent just 7.5 per cent of the general population.

Prison officials face a difficult choice between absorbing hardened militants into the general prison population, where they might radicalise others, or to concentrate them in special wards where they may be better able to hatch plots. “We’re sitting on a time bomb,” says Adeline Hazan, who heads a state agency tasked with auditing French prisons.

Last week, a French teenager recently released from Fleury-Merogis stormed a church in the north of France with an ­accomplice and killed a Catholic priest celebrating Mass.

Adel Kermiche, 19, wrote that he met his “spiritual guide” in the prison, where he was being detained for twice trying to travel to Syria, according to police, who reviewed messages he posted on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app. The “sheik”, as Kermiche referred to him, “gave him ideas”, he wrote.

Eighty-two French nationals convicted of terrorism since the summer of 2012 and 154 alleged terrorists awaiting trial are in jail. In addition, more than 1000 inmates are under surveillance as suspected Islamist radicals.

The influx, authorities warn, is transforming facilities designed for punishment into incubators for future terror attacks. The moment Mehdi Nemmouche completed a prison term for armed robbery in 2012, prison administrators flagged the radical Islamist as a threat to national security. He later travelled to Syria and then resurfaced in May 2014 at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, where he allegedly shot four people dead — an allegation he denies.

Mohamed Merah — who killed three paratroopers, a Jewish schoolteacher, and three children in 2012 before police shot him dead — was also radicalised in a French prison, authorities say. When he entered prison, for snatching a woman’s handbag, Merah was “just a kid banging on his cell’s door shouting for his PlayStation”, says Philippe Campagne, a prison guard who knew him.

Abdeslam himself was once a petty criminal who served time in a Belgian prison for attempted car robbery. His partner in that 2010 crime, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was sentenced to the same prison. After both men were released, Abaaoud travelled to Syria, tapping Abdeslam to shepherd suicide bombers across Europe, where they mounted attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.

Now re-incarcerated, Abdeslam has joined a prison class system that a 2015 audit of French prisons conducted by a state agency described as “astonishing”.

Islamist radicals act as an “aristocracy”, the audit says, forbidding other inmates to take showers naked or listen to music. Also banned: TV matches of women’s tennis.

A 52-year-old inmate who has been in and out of prison for a decade says radicals who once kept to themselves now reach out to thieves and drug dealers. “They’re now willing to promote their cause by whatever means possible,” he says.

Radicals have little trouble communicating beyond prison walls. French intelligence recovered contraband mobile phones from one jail showing that many inmates had contacted people in Syria and Yemen. A popular wallpaper for such phones is the ­Islamic State flag.

Terror attacks come from many sources — Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the truck attacker who mowed down 84 people in Nice on July 14, wasn’t known to have any connection to terrorist groups.

Officials, though, are most concerned about the conversions taking place in prisons. Mohamadou Sy, 24, who served part of a three-year sentence for drug dealing in Fleury-Merogis, recalls how a retinue of “soft-spoken and well-educated” men regularly made the rounds in the prison yard. They bonded with other inmates, he said, by teaching hand-to-hand combat, a useful skill in prison. “If you’re weak, you’re done,” says Sy.

In an attempt to disrupt the aura around radical inmates, governments across the continent are experimenting with special measures such as segregating radicals on special floors. Implementation is piecemeal and sluggish. Only a fraction of the terrorists in French and Belgian jails are transferred to these new units and legal challenges could constrain authorities from holding radicals in solitary confinement.

Assigning radicals to a special ward, meanwhile, risks being challenged in court as an extrajudicial form of punishment.

In Belgium, the West’s biggest supplier of Islamic State fighters on a per capita basis, two prisons are retrofitted with special wards to house radicals.

The Belgian government wants to transfer radicals to the new wards only once they are caught recruiting other prisoners, says Sieghild Lacoere, spokeswoman for the Belgian Justice Ministry. “We don’t want to create a Guantanamo,” she says.

That softer approach hinges on the prisons’ experimental use of “deradicalisation” therapy, which aims to reintegrate radicals into society.

Doctors, social workers and state-approved imams are brought into prisons to attempt to rehabilitate radicals before their release. Critics point to at least one high-profile failure in Germany, saying it is ineffective and distracts from the primary goal of securing public safety.

In France, which has spawned more Islamic State fighters than any other Western country, authorities are grouping radicals together in special units.

The initiative has stirred an internal debate among top officials in President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government. While some ministers publicly praise the measures as a long-overdue reform, other officials are seething in private. Former justice minister Christiane Taubira, who resigned in January to protest against the government’s plans to strip terrorists of their French citizenship, expressed “grave reservations” over the idea of grouping radicals together.

“This is madness,” says a former counter-terrorism official. “We are putting together terrorists who didn’t know each other ... and helping them create tight, impenetrable networks,” the official says.

Fleury-Morogis, on the outskirts of Paris, is Europe’s largest prison. It has 4200 inmates spread across 180 hectares.

A netting of metal wires stretches over its rooftops to prevent inmates from escaping aboard helicopters.

In 2004, the prison received a new inmate: 23-year-old Amedy Coulibaly. Convicted of armed robbery, Coulibaly spent 22 hours a day locked up in his cell.

“Prison changed me,” Coulibaly told journalist Warda Mohamed after his release in 2008.

“I learnt about Islam in prison. Before that I wasn’t interested, now I pray,” Coulibaly said. “Just for that, I’m glad I went to prison.”

His mentor, according to court documents, was 39-year-old al-Qa’ida recruiter Djamel Beghal, an, serving a 10-year prison sentence in a cell near Coulibaly’s for involvement in a 2001 plot to bomb the US embassy in Paris.

Beghal cultivated a circle of followers because he was a “man of science and religion”, Coulibaly told police in 2010.

By the time Coulibaly was released in March 2014, the officials who run France’s prison system realised they had a big problem. In May, Paris’s top prison administrators wrote to the government raising the alarm about the growing influence of radicals inside their walls. The letter described the prisons as being “on the verge of a breakdown”.

In one facility, a dozen prisoners jailed on suspicion of terrorism managed to attract a following of 20 other inmates with no history of radicalisation. During a cell search, authorities found an ­Islamic State headband and a map of the Paris railway network.

Some women visiting the prison were under pressure to change out of their jeans and T-shirts into hijabs before meeting inmates. Prisoners insulted women who refused.

In the northern autumn of 2014, the warden of Fresnes prison, decided to shake things up. Stephane Scotto rounded up 22 radical inmates and transferred them to a single floor. The group was singled out, he says, because they had begun “dictating their own rules inside the prison, forbidding inmates from talking to women, taking showers naked or listening to music”.

The revamp was too late to prevent the next attack.

In January 2015, Coulibaly gunned down a police officer in the street and four shoppers in a kosher grocery before being killed in a police raid.

Televisions inside Fresnes prison broadcast news of Coulibaly’s attacks to inmates. At the time, Sy’s prison cell was right above the unit Scotto had created for radicals. The group was ecstatic about Coulibaly’s bloody exploit. “They all shouted Allahu akbar,” Sy says. “I could hear them preaching to other inmates through the window.”

French jihadist Adel Kermiche, 19, identifying himself as Abu Jaleel al-Hanafi, one of the two men who cut the throat of a 86-year-old priest.

In a video filmed before his death, Coulibaly calmly explained that he had co-ordinated attacks with Cherif Kouachi, whom he met inside Fleury-Merogis. Days earlier, Kouachi and his brother Said killed a dozen people during an attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

The bloodshed persuaded the government the prison system was in need of retooling. It launched a pilot project designed to identify radical inmates and rehabilitating them.

The program worked with inmates who volunteered to meet with social workers, sociologists, former inmates and terrorism victims. “The idea was to create a dialogue,” says Ouisa Kies, a Paris-based sociologist who ran the program.

While Kies was conducting her research, Salah Abdeslam was ­allegedly at work shepherding radicals across Europe to stage a terrorist attack that would rank as the bloodiest in French history.

When the group struck — killing 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall and in restaurants and bars across Paris’ night-life district — Abdeslam slipped away.

The government accelerated its overhaul, setting up anti-radicalisation units in four prisons, including Fleury-Merogis and Fresnes. As of May, about 10 inmates had been transferred to a floor in Fleury-Merogis dedicated to holding 40 radicals.

The new units are expected to hold Islamic State recruiters, French nationals jailed after returning home from Syria and people imprisoned for speaking out in support of terrorists. “We are creating the best conditions for the worst to happen,” says the former anti-terror official who is critical of the program.

One inmate slated for the radicals unit at Fleury-Merogis is Karim Mohamed Aggad, the older brother of a suicide bomber who attacked the Bataclan. He denies playing any role in the November attacks. “I’ll go to the unit. Like a laboratory rat,” Mohamed Aggad told a court in June. Last month he was sentenced to nine years in jail for travelling to Syria in 2013 with his younger brother and joining ­Islamic State.

Under questioning from police, Mohamed Aggad recounted how he and his brother filled out an ­Islamic State form shortly after their arrival in Syria, specifying whether they planned to fight in the Syrian civil war or become a suicide bomber, according to court documents.

“We chose to fight,” Mohamed Aggad told police.

He became disillusioned with the war and returned to France in April 2014, leaving his brother behind.

After his arrest, he was sent to Fleury-Mrogis, where he received a visit from his mother.

“What are they going to do?” Mohamed Aggad asked her, according to court documents. “Open my skull and take the radical part out of my brain?”

The Wall Street Journal