France is facing unprecedented menace – both internal and external – as it is struggling to battle terrorism, Bernard Squarcini, former head of the French Internal Security Bureau has warned speaking to RT’s SophieCo show.

Sitting in with RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze, the ex-spy chief underscored that France does not feel secure at all. He explained that threats exist both beyond and inside its borders, including people in the French territory using the Internet to serve their malign purposes.

“France is very much threatened, like never before,” – he proclaimed adding that France is struggling to deal with those threats, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks that bloodied the country in recent years.

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Paris is part of a global intelligence approach, but this area faces its own challenges not to allow data mining to “attack [the] national sovereignty” of each state. The methods to battle terrorism still need to be improved, the ex-spy chief believes, as a terrorist cannot be spotted on a European level so far.

Squarcini revealed that the militants’ plans to “infiltrate via the massive clandestine immigration networks” have challenged one of the core principles of the EU, freedom of movement. It further created “a political problem for Europe” forcing some countries like Italy to shut their borders due to perceived migration insecurity, he stressed.

However, Paris is not going to take to radical measures and close its borders as the US did. “We cannot build a wall like Mr Trump!”

Another problem is that a new type of terrorist has emerged. Now they do not need years of training but can be radicalized within their family in any other place, and it would take him “only fifteen days” to learn terrorist ways. Thus the security services face an even more complex task – literally to “probe the consciousness” to detect a person capable of committing an offense.

Watch the full show with Bernard Squarcini.

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