Move is intended to improve sharing of intelligence, and government plans to make some emergency powers permanent

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Emmanuel Macron has created a counter-terrorism taskforce to improve the sharing of intelligence, as the government prepares to transfer certain special policing powers granted under France’s state of emergency into permanent law.

The creation of the taskforce under the authority of the presidential palace was one of Macron’s manifesto promises, and he intends to make the fight against terrorism a bigger focus of his presidency than his predecessors did.

On Tuesday, a 40-year-old Algerian student who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State attempted to assault a police officer with a hammer outside Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, shouting: “This is for Syria.” A government spokesman said the attacker had not previously shown any signs of radicalisation.

A series of jihadi attacks in France have killed more than 230 people in the space of two years. Many of the perpetrators were known to authorities, and there have been calls for better coordination of France’s many intelligence agencies.

Last year a parliamentary investigation identified multiple failings by French intelligence in relation to the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks in January and November 2015 respectively.

For example, Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four people in a siege at a kosher grocery store in connection to the Charlie Hebdo attack and shot dead a police officer, was a known radical and repeat offender. While serving a prison sentence for his part in a plot to free another terrorist from jail, he had been flagged as having been radicalised. This information was not passed from prison services to intelligence agencies on his release.

France has six intelligence units answering variously to the interior, defence and economy ministries.

The new taskforce will comprise around 20 people, chiefly intelligence analysts, who will supervise and oversee all counter-terrorism efforts directly under the president’s authority.

Macron is not scrapping or replacing the current intelligence operations, nor bringing them under one single umbrella as some politicians have called for. Instead he is hoping to make France’s existing agencies cooperate and share intelligence better.

The taskforce will determine strategies to tackle radicalisation on the internet and the sharing of instructions on how to carry out an attack. There will be a focus on the issue of French citizens trying to return from fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The taskforce will be led by Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, a former head of a counter-espionage agency.

Macron now faces the issue of how to bring France out of the state of emergency, which was imposed after the Paris attacks and has been extended several times. It is expected to be extended one more time, until November, while the government prepares to transfer elements of the special police powers into permanent law.

The state of emergency allows police to conduct house raids and searches without a warrant or judicial oversight, including at night, and gives extra powers to officials to place people under house arrest outside the normal judicial process and to close places of worship. It also allows for restrictions on large gatherings.

Details of the new counter-terrorism law will be examined by the French cabinet this month, after the final round of parliamentary elections in which Macron’s new political movement is expected to win a majority.

On Wednesday, Macron announced that a third French citizen had been identified as a victim of Saturday’s London Bridge attack. He did not identify the victim.

British police searching for the French man Xavier Thomas, 45, said they had recovered a body from the Thames downstream from the bridge.

“We are paying a heavy cost in these attacks,” Macron said.