Here’s the latest on terror threats around the world
PARIS — French police arrested 12 people on Friday suspected of helping militant Islamist gunmen in last week’s killings in Paris, where visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry laid wreaths at two main attack sites.
The arrests came after Belgian police killed two men and detained 13 suspects on Thursday in raids on an Islamist group prosecutors said was about to attack police there. Two related suspects were arrested in France and German police arrested two people after raiding 12 properties linked to radical Salafists. No link between any of them and the Paris attacks was confirmed.
Seventeen victims and the three attackers died in three days of violence in Paris last week that began with an assault on the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
BIG HUG TO PARIS
Kerry greeted President Francois Hollande on Friday morning with a hug at the Elysee presidential palace. He said on Thursday his visit was to give a “big hug” to Paris.
There were no senior U.S. officials at a commemoration march in Paris on Sunday attended by dozens of world leaders, an absence Washington later conceded was an omission.
“You have the full and heartfelt condolences of the American people and I know you know that we share the pain and the horror of everything that you went through,” Kerry told Hollande.
Kerry and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius visited the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery, where they laid wreaths in memory of the victims.
INVESTIGATIONS
Investigators are poring over the chain of events that led to three French nationals — two brothers with Algerian roots and a third of West African extraction — perpetrating the worst attacks in the country for decades.
In Belgium, a spokesman for state prosecutors said there was no apparent link between the two men killed during the shootout in the eastern city of Verviers and the Paris attacks.
Belgian investigators were also examining if a man detained in the city of Charleroi on suspicion of arms trafficking had any links with Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.
Belgian police are holding 13 suspects detained during a dozen raids across the country on Thursday against an Islamist group and a further two people targeted by the investigation were held in France, state prosecutors said.
As well as guns and explosives, police uniforms were found in the apartment at Verviers, he said. Officials have said they feared the group was about to launch attacks on police stations.
POTENTIAL THREATS
Amid the deadly attacks in Paris last week and the raids in Belgium on Thursday, European counterterrorism agencies are scrambling to identify and thwart potential threats, officials said.
European security services in recent weeks have received indications that the extremist group ISIS may have started directing European adherents in Syria and Iraq to launch attacks back in their home countries, a senior European counterterrorism official told CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank.
The official said security agencies in a number of European countries were intensely investigating several groups of returnees from Syria and Iraq, including individuals back on Belgian soil, who they suspect could be plotting terrorist attacks.
The official named France, the United Kingdom and Belgium as countries facing a particular threat and said counterterrorism agencies in Germany are also on high alert.
‘POISONOUS IDEOLOGY’
U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to take on “the poisonous ideology” of Islamic extremists and said intelligence agencies must be allowed to track militants online despite privacy concerns.
Obama and Cameron held two days of White House talks amid increasing concern in Europe about the threat posed by extremists after 17 people were killed in Paris attacks and Belgian authorities engaged in a firefight with terror suspects.
“We face a poisonous and fanatical ideology that wants to pervert one of the world’s major religions, Islam, and create conflict, terror and death. With our allies, we will confront it wherever it appears,” Cameron told a joint White House news conference with Obama after their talks.
Obama said he and Cameron accepted that intelligence and military force alone would not solve the problem, and they would work together on “strategies to counter violent extremism that radicalizes recruits and mobilizes people, especially young people, to engage in terrorism.”
