‘IS entered EU way ahead of Brussels attack’

BRUSSELS: The day he left Syria with instructions to carry out a terrorist attack in France, Reda Hame, a 29-year-old computer technician from Paris, had been a member of the Islamic State for just over a week.

His French passport and his background in IT made him an ideal recruit for a rapidly expanding group within IS dedicated to terrorising Europe. Just a few days ago, he was rushed to a park, shown how to fire an assault rifle, handed a grenade and told to hurl it at a human silhouette. His accelerated course included how to use an encryption program called TrueCrypt, the first step in a process intended to mask communications with his IS handler in Syria.

The handler, code-named Dad, drove Hame to the Turkish border and sent him off with advice to pick an easy target, shoot as many civilians as possible and hold hostages until the security forces made a martyr of him.

“Be brave,” Dad said, embracing him. Hame was sent out by a body inside IS that was obsessed with striking Europe for at least two years before the deadly assaults in Paris last November and in Brussels this month. During that time, the group dispatched a string of operative strained in Syria, aiming to carryout small attacks meant to test and stretch Europe’s security apparatus even as the most deadly assaults were in the works, according to court proceedings, interrogation transcripts and records of European wire taps obtained by The New York Times.

Officials now say the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot.

“This didn’t all of a sudden pop up in the last six months,” said Michael T Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. “They have been contemplating external attacks ever since the group moved into Syria in 2012.” Hame was arrested in Paris last August, before he could strike, one of at least 21 trained operatives who slipped back into Europe.

European officials now know that Dad, Ham e’ s handler, was none other than Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian operative who selected and trained fighters for plots in Europe and who returned himself to oversee the Paris attack, the deadlie st terrorist strike on European soil in over a decade.

“It’s a factory over there,” Hame warned his interlocutors from France’s intelligence service after his arrest. “They are doing everything possible to strike France, or else Europe.”