Paris attacks: Dream of an open EU gets a reality check

The political will for an open and free Europe has wilted following the slaughter of 129 people in Paris.

The political will for an open and free Europe has wilted following the slaughter of 129 people in Paris last week.

Fuelling fears is the revelation that at least three of the terrorists, including the man credited with orchestrating the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, were able to enter and leave Europe at will, at least twice hiding among the flood of migrants making their way through the Balkans.

How someone who was the subject of an international arrest warrant and had been sentenced to 20 years’ jail in absentia moved across multiple borders has highlighted the flaws in Europe’s migration practices. Abaaoud left Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany for Turkey on January 20, days after police thwarted a terrorist attack on crowds of people buying commemorative Charlie Hebdo magazines. But Germany let him through because he was not on a German no-fly list.

French President Francois Hollande said the country needed to know who was within its borders and implemented a three-month state of emergency to ensure checks were carried out on all people entering or leaving. He has been pushing the rest of ­Europe to follow suit.

“Things are not going far enough. Things are not moving fast enough,” France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said. “Europe owes it to all the victims of terrorism to act.”

Exacerbating the problem was that the free movement of people between countries had not been accompanied by the sharing of ­intelligence.

Abaaoud, as well as Samy ­Amimour and the unidentified Stade de France bomber found with a fake passport in the name of Ahmed Almohamed, 25, exploited the lax border controls to get into Europe.

Records also show Bataclan gunman Omar Ismail Mostefai had entered Turkey, but there is no paperwork to show him leaving, and the Turks had alerted France twice, most recently in June, of their suspicions about him.

The proliferation of counterfeit documents — shown by the fact six people have been found with the same fake Syrian passport as the Stade de France bomber — has raised fears about the ­authenticity of many of the ­new migrants within the EU.

The European Commission is valiantly trying to keep alive its European dream of open access, but countries are increasingly fed up with the flood of migrants pouring in.

“Sweden has probably been naive,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said as he called for biometric checks of all migrants at the external borders of Europe. The Netherlands has suggested “a mini-Schengen’’ of an internal open border area between northern European countries. It was the 1985 Schengen Agreement that opened Europe’s internal borders.

Even Germany, which will welcome a million refugees this year, has called for urgent action on the external borders of Europe and will reignite talks with Turkey. However, Turkey wants to improve visa access for its 75 million people in return for rigorous border control.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said “we need to regain an effective control, both in fighting Islamist terrorism and in managing the refugee streams, in identifying fighters returning from Syria and in registering and guiding refugees”.

Belgium Prime Minister Charles Michel said returning ­jihadis would be jailed and ­extremist preachers banned in his country.

The EU will look to introduce the previously resisted idea of passenger name records to be shared around countries by January. The creation of a European watchlist, similar to the US no-fly list, is also on the table.