Source: The New York Times
MAGNANVILLE, France — The first time Larossi Abballa appeared on the radar of French terrorism investigators, the only act of violence they could pin on him was killing bunnies.
He had joined a small group of men, all bent on waging jihad, on a trip to a snowy forest in northern France five years ago, when he was 19. There, they videotaped themselves slaughtering the rabbits, bought so the men could grow used to the feel of killing.
When he and seven others were later arrested, the authorities found that several of the men had saved the video of the slaughter on their cellphones, alongside footage of soldiers being beheaded, according to French court records. Mr. Abballa was eventually convicted on a terrorism charge and spent more than two years in prison.
In hindsight, it is not hard to see how that first act of brutality foreshadowed what happened last week: Armed with a knife, Mr. Abballa attacked a couple in northern France in the name of the Islamic State and left them to bleed to death.
But at the time of his arrest in 2011, investigators were not able to definitively show that he was a permanent threat to France. After his prison stint, he was placed under surveillance. Just months after the wiretaps stopped, he committed the double murder last week.
Across Europe and the United States, law enforcement officials are struggling to reckon with attackers like Mr. Abballa and Omar Mateen, whose shooting rampage this month at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., left 49 dead. They are men who clearly seemed to be building toward violent acts, and whose names had surfaced in terrorism investigations, but who avoided crossing legal lines that could tip off the authorities until it was too late.
With thousands of terrorism surveillance cases running at any given time, the European authorities say they are swamped and are in the difficult position of trying to head off attacks of which the only forewarning is often in the form of what someone thinks or what they are overheard saying.
“A man is in a shop and thinks about stealing an object,” said Georges Sauveur, a Paris lawyer who has defended several terrorism suspects, including one of the men who accompanied Mr. Abballa to the forest in 2011 to slaughter the rabbits. “What do you do? You put him in jail?”
Mr. Sauveur added, “You can’t put him in jail unless he takes the next step and attempts to steal something.”
In late 2010, France’s domestic intelligence agency began watching Mohamed Niaz Abdul Raseed, 33, who was living in the Val d’Oise region of northern France and who the agency suspected was a recruiter for Al Qaeda. The investigation revealed that he had lured seven adherents, the youngest of whom was Mr. Abballa.
Under the older man’s instruction, the young men met in a public park to do calisthenics, enrolled in a kung fu class and gathered for lessons on extremist Islam. They also took their day trip to the forest in Cormeilles-en-Parisis with the rabbits, which they had pooled their money to buy.
‘Thirsty for Blood’
By the spring of 2011, two members of the group had gone to Pakistan, where they were met by a facilitator for Al Qaeda, according to French court records obtained by The New York Times.
As the most junior member of the group, Mr. Abballa was not chosen to go, and that frustrated him. “I’m thirsty for blood, Allah is my witness,” he wrote in an email intercepted by the authorities. In another, he begged, “Please let me go, pls, pls, pls.”
When it appeared that he would not be sent to Pakistan, he turned his rage toward France, writing on Feb. 19, 2011, “With Allah’s will, we will find a way to raise the flag here.” A week later, he wrote that his cell would “wipe away the infidels.”
He was arrested on May 14, 2011, and like the other members of the cell was convicted on a charge of belonging to a criminal or terrorist organization, carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years, said Sébastien Bono, the lawyer representing the accused leader of the group.
Considered the group’s least influential member, Mr. Abballa spent more than two years in prison and was released in 2013. He was kept under surveillance until the end of 2015.
“It’s very easy retrospectively, with hindsight, to say that law enforcement, or government, should have known about someone’s intent. But obviously there’s a big difference between motivation — someone being radicalized — and then going out and actually acting on that,” said Richard Walton, who led the counterterrorism unit for the London Metropolitan Police during the 2012 Olympics. “At any one time, in any country, there will be many hundreds, if not several thousand suspects, that fit this profile.”
Among the difficulties for the authorities in 2011 was that Mr. Abballa had aggressively denied any connection to terrorism. He told investigators he was an atheist. He denied that he had taken part in the practice-beheadings of rabbits — he was not seen on the video — even though the seven other men in the cell all said he had participated. And the members of the group contradicted one another. When pushed, one of Mr. Abballa’s accomplices explained that they had slaughtered the animals in order to have halal meat to eat during the Islamic holiday of Eid, according to a summary of their interrogation.
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