The message appears to be another of those spread to report on the fight against jihadist gangs, but no: Libyan intelligence has dismantled a Daesh (Islamic State, Isis) cell led by Sudanese elements that was facilitating the transport of people from their country and Chad to Libya for onward travel to other destinations.
To what other destinations? The answer is as clear as the reality of the illegal immigrant trade from the Libyan coast to Europe. The jihadists would hide among these people in order to invade the West for reasons that are easy to imagine.
Some counterterrorism experts tend to give little importance to this type of terrorist penetration and focus on detecting lone perpetrators – “wolves” – but there are already precedents, all dramatic, in which this has been demonstrated Individuals who arrived among the immigrants committed atrocious crimes.
Brahim Aoussaoui is one of the examples. He was the suspected perpetrator of the triple murder that took place in the Basilica of Notre Dame de Nice in France in October 2020. He comes from Tunisia and came to Europe a few weeks earlier via the Italian island of Lampedusa. When the terrorist entered Italian soil, he was quarantined and later released with orders to leave the country, but he ignored them and went to France.
A few years ago,Some of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks in 2015, They entered Europe in disguise as illegal immigrants. The Belgian Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the attacks for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, was tasked with searching for other members of the “commando”, which was carried out between August 30 and October 2 of the year. constitutive. They had entered Europe on false Syrian passports, disguised among immigrants crossing the Mediterranean. But their false passports raised doubts and they couldn’t get into the cell in time.
When they were released, they were arrested by Austrian security forces months after the attacks. Telephone numbers from that country were found in his possession: Greek, Italian, English, French, German, Belgian, Turkish and, most worryingly, Spanish. It was then proven that those arrested were involved in the above-mentioned criminal acts.
Adel Haddadi and Muhamad Husman, as they are known, met with Abu Ahmad, who was then responsible for the Islamic State’s “attacks abroad,” two months before the attacks in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Some of the Paris terrorists were there too. When they were arrested in Austria, two Vienna-Paris train tickets were found in their possession, showing that they retained the will to continue carrying out terrorist attacks. They had already received money from their manager in Syria.
There are other cases, such as the case of some jihadists who were arrested by the National Police upon their arrival from Algeria to the Levantine coasts with plans that were foiled. One of them, a rapper, son of an al-Qaeda leader who fought with ISIS and committed suicide in prison. And others who were heading to Catalonia, probably with the intention of getting to France and carrying out attacks.
