08-Feb-15: In France, anti-terror police focus on the enabling role of money

Image Source: Reuters

We posted here earlier today ["08-Feb-15: Foreign money and the Palestinian Arab terror it buys"] about the enabling role that funding and money play in terror.

At about the time we were writing it, the police in France were arresting six more suspects in connection with the recruiting of jihadists. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said

that anti-terrorism magistrates in Paris had ordered Sunday's raid following a probe opened in January last year into "conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and financing of terrorism." A source close to the probe said five people were held in the southern city of Albi and another in the southwest of France. All in their 30s, they are suspected of handling questionable money transfers and having recruited candidates to wage jihad. [AFP, today]

There's more. Five other people were charged Saturday in the Paris and Lyon regions, while yet another four are remanded in custody. It's actually a drop in the bucket given that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says the French authorities were monitoring about 3,000 people involved in “terrorist networks.”

A cluster of investigations into suspected jihadi networks is happening in and around Toulouse, where Mohammed Merah killed seven people, including three children outside a Jewish school, in 2012. (We reflected on Merah and the significance of those Toulouse slayings: "19-Apr-12: How the murder of three French children has become the launch of a new chapter in the conquest of Europe by the terrorists").

As for Moussa Coulibaly, the knife-wielding man who attacked soldiers in Nice who were guarding a Jewish community center ["03-Feb-15: Jewish community center in France is scene of yet another stabbing attack"], he has now been charged with attempted murder in connection with terrorism.