Frontex, the European border agency, warned more than 18 months ago that radicalised European jihadis could exploit the migrant crisis in order to return to Europe and commit terrorism, but systematic checks on migrants only began last Friday, The Telegraph can reveal.
\nThe failure of Europe\u2019s border bureaucracy to respond to the terror threat emerged as security sources told The Telegraph that it will still be \u201cmonths, even years\u201d before Europe\u2019s borders are fully capable of screening arrivals.
\nFrontex\u2019s own risk assessment for April 2014 said that the numbers of foreign fighters travelling to Syria and Iraq for jihad had \u201crisen threefold\u201d, with some would-be fighters as young 15 years old.
\nThe report noted that EU representatives were \u201cincreasingly discussing ways\u201d to monitor and prevent young people moving to Syria, while clearly acknowledging that the fighters could return to Europe \u201cideologically and militarily trained, thus posing a terrorist threat to societies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cost of inaction over securing Europe\u2019s external borders were displayed to devastating effect this week, when it emerged that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind behind the Paris attacks, had slipped into France unchecked – via Greece – without setting off alarms.
\nHe had previously joked in the Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, how he had once been stopped by Belgian police but not arrested.
\nThe inability of Europe to protect its borders has been blamed on a combination of a lack of resources in poorer members like Greece, Romania and Bulgaria and privacy concerns that have stalled necessary legislation in the European Parliament.<\/p>\n
The cost of inaction over securing Europe\u2019s external borders were displayed to devastating effect this week, when it emerged that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind behind the Paris attacks, had slipped into France unchecked – via Greece – without setting off alarms.
\nHe had previously joked in the Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, how he had once been stopped by Belgian police but not arrested.
\nThe inability of Europe to protect its borders has been blamed on a combination of a lack of resources in poorer members like Greece, Romania and Bulgaria and privacy concerns that have stalled necessary legislation in the European Parliament.<\/p>\n
Timothy Kirkhope, a Tory MEP and former immigration minister, blamed \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d and the view that \u201cpeople should be allowed to go anywhere they like\u201d for the failure to adequately stand up Frontex.
\n\u201cThe external border has to be protected, and if the Greeks and Italians can\u2019t do it we have to beef up Frontex. We’ve got to put the money in,\u201d he added. \u201cI’ve been pressing them to get on this: to not let anyone go anywhere without being processed.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a sign of the glacial rate of progress, the same warnings on the potential security risk posed by migrant were repeated almost word-for-word in the 2015 version of the Frontex report.
\nAs recently as September Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex, admitted to a House of Lords committee that Frontex had \u201cno access to intelligence\u201d since it was an EU agency.
\nMr Leggeri said that Frontex could find \u201cno evidence\u201d that potential terrorists had used migrant routes to cross back into the EU, but was forced to admit that this was probably because it was not connected with anti-terror databases.<\/p>\n
\u201cFRONTEX, as an EU agency, has no access to this kind of operational intelligence,\u2019 he admitted, \u201cThis may be why we cannot trace evidence of people who might be involved in terrorist activities.\u201d
\nFrance has been demanding tough new controls ever since last January\u2019s terror attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which were finally agreed to a meeting of EU home ministers in Brussels last week.<\/p>\n
These include that European passenger name records (PNR) data should be collected and available for scrutiny by intelligence agencies, and that EU citizens should also be subjected to \u201csystematic\u201d checks when re-entering Europe.<\/p>\n
However, senior officials have admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that it will take \u201cmonths, if not years\u201d to secure the EU borders, even as richer EU nations were offering to send small \u2018hit squads\u2019 to plug the most obvious gaps in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis kind of capacity cannot be stood up overnight,\u201d said the source close to the discussions over securing Europe\u2019s borders, \u201cit will take many months \u2013 and realistically years \u2013 before we really do screen everyone entering Europe against databases of known terrorists and criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n
The scale of challenge was revealed in the official communique from the EU Home Ministers meeting, that admitted that many EU border posts still required \u201celectronic connection\u201d to relevant Interpol databases.
\nAs a sign of the depth of concern, Dutch officials this week even floated the idea of a \u201cmini-Schengen\u201d, that would dramatically cut Europe\u2019s 26-member open-frontier zone, taking it back to its original core of group of Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.<\/p>\n
Germany and the European Commission have rejected the idea, arguing the answer must be to focus on fixing Schengen as it currently exists, perhaps even by creating an EU-wide intelligence agency, an idea that was quickly shot down by member states.
\nEven before the Paris attacks, Donald Tusk, the European Council president had acknowledged that the EU was in a \u201crace against time\u201d to stop the collapse of Schengen. \u201cThe clock is ticking, we are under pressure, we need to act fast,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Europe remains at risk of further terror attacks that analysts warn could shatter confidence in a Schengen free-movement system whose credibility has already been seriously damaged by two major terror attacks on Paris in the space of nine months.<\/p>\n
Carsten Nickel, Europe analyst with Teneo Intelligence, compared the existential nature of the Schengen crisis with that of the Euro crisis earlier this year, but warned that the security issues would be even harder to fix at a European level.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is that it is going to take a while to build up the administrative and physical capabilities required to protect Europe\u2019s external borders,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs with the Eurozone crisis, there is a logic to creating a centralized, supra-national institutions \u2013 like, say in the case of the Eurozone, the ECB – to tackle the problem; but when it comes to security it is just not clear there is the same administrative and political capacity to deliver,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n