Legislators urge intel overhaul after Paris attacks

PARIS — A parliamentary inquiry in France has urged the authorities to overhaul the intelligence services by creating a unified structure, after identifying multiple failures before the two devastating terrorist attacks that struck the country in 2015, lawmakers said Tuesday.

At a news conference in Paris, the lawmakers who took part in the inquiry called on the French authorities to replace the overlapping and sometimes competing agencies. The committee that conducted the inquiry laid out 40 proposals to address the failures, including the merging of several French intelligence services and the creation of a shared antiterrorism database.

The inquiry was prompted largely by attacks on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket elsewhere in the Paris area in January 2015 that left 17 people dead, and by a coordinated series of assaults in and around the city in November in which Islamic State militants killed 130 people.

“Today, we don’t measure up to those who are attacking us,” said Georges Fenech, a center-right lawmaker who presided over the inquiry.

The lawmakers also called for better intelligence sharing among European countries, pointing to several instances in which perpetrators of the Nov. 13 attacks were able to escape because information was not adequately shared between countries.

Many of the attackers were known to the French or Belgian authorities because they had criminal records or had previously been identified as showing signs of radicalization. Some had even been under surveillance.

Fenech also said that France needed to create a structure comparable to the National Counterterrorism Center in the United States, one of the countries the committee visited during its inquiry.

The committee is expected to publish a full report July 12.