The year 2014 appeared to be a great challenge for international security, with several terrorist attacks hitting major countries in different parts of the world. The first target of extremist attacks was the capital of Europe – Brussels. In May, a man armed with a handgun and a Kalashnikov rifle opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium. The attack, which lasted less than 90 seconds, claimed lives of four people.
Two of the victims were Israelis — a middle-aged couple on holiday from Tel Aviv. The third was a French woman of Polish descent. It was later discovered that she had left France for Brussels only two months before the shooting. Notably, the reason for moving, according to friends of the deceased, was that she felt unsafe in France after the infamous Toulouse killings. In Brussels the woman hoped to live a quiet retirement and was volunteering as a tourist guide at the Jewish museum.
Another victim was a young Belgian man born in Morocco, who also worked at the museum. He was critically wounded and died in hospital a week after the attack. The shooter fled the scene on foot and his image was caught on security cameras. A nationwide manhunt was launched immediately. The attacker was soon identified as Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French citizen of Algerian origin.
Nemmouche grew up in Roubaix in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France. He had a criminal history that included a 5-year prison sentence for robbery. According to the chief prosecutor of Paris Francois Molins, Nemmouche became radicalized while serving his term. After his release in 2012 he left for Syria, where he is believed to have spent over a year among Islamists and was even featured in a video bearing the ISIL flag. Four days after the Brussels attack, Nemmouche was detained at the St. Charles Train Station in Marseille. The customs police discovered a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his luggage, a revolver, ammunition, and gun parts wrapped in a white sheet with the ISIL logo. Nemmouche was also carrying a short video in which he claimed responsibility for the museum killings. He was extradited to Belgium in late July.
More details emerged as the investigation went on. A week after the museum massacre, French journalist Nicolas Henin recognized Mehdi Nemmouche as the man who held him and other French hostages in Syria between June 2013 and August 2014. Back then Nemmouche was known as Abou Omar, a war name given to him while he was being trained as an ISIL fighter, said Henin.
“I was in a rest-cure clinic in Germany when I saw his pictures. They were not good pictures. With a lot of pixels as if they’d been faxed. But the air of familiarity hypnotized me. I said to myself: ‘Impossible, it can’t be him.’ I spent a long night of insomnia with my computer on my knees. Abou Omar was getting to me one more time like a ghost from Syria.”
According to the journalist, Omar was exceptionally brutal in beating his prisoners, but at the same time could come into their cell to sing French songs and discuss popular TV shows. At some point, he may also have been the jailer of American reporter James Foley, who was detained along with the French journalists and whose execution was one of the first videotaped by ISIL. After all these discoveries Belgian federal prosecutor Frédéric Van Leeuw said Nemmouche’s case highlighted the increasing threat of radicalized European citizens fighting in Syria only to return home and carry out terrorist activities.
“The new elements in this investigation draw attention once again to the problem of the ‘returnees’ – in other words the people going to Syria to participate in combat and return afterward to our country. All European countries are confronted at this moment with this problem.”
These concerns were echoed by French President Francois Hollande who stated that France was determined to stop the jihadists and make sure that “when they come back from a fight that is not theirs, and that is definitely not ours, they cannot do any harm". However, there were too many comparisons between the museum shooting and the case of the Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah, who just like Nemmouche, was brought up in France but became radicalized in prison. This meant that European security services failed to prevent an almost identical attack carried out two years later.
The frustration felt within society made an impact on the political setup in the EU. The day after the Brussels tragedy, an election was held for a new European parliament. The right-wing parties won a considerable amount of seats, which according to analysts, could be seen as a direct consequence of the growing sense of frailty and paranoia spreading across the continent in response to the homegrown radicalization.
