The Failures of French Intelligence
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The search continues for Abdeslam Salah, a suspect who managed to elude capture during the Paris attacks. French authorities stopped him the day after the attack near the Belgian border—he presented his papers to the police and was subsequently let go.
It's one of a series of failures during the buildup and aftermath of Friday's attacks, which Corrinne Narassiguin, spokesperson for Hollande's government, admitted in an interview with the BBC.
“Obviously there was a failure of intelligence," she said. "So we'll have to look into this. We know that we still have improvements to go through, and the investigation will tell us where we should improve.”
Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia, a professor at Rutgers University, says that those failures were part of a much larger systemic problem. France, she says, didn't understand who the real threat was.
