Paris: France changed its military strategy and started airstrikes in Syria 2015 because of concerns months before the attacks on Paris that ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud was plotting to target a concert and take hostages, according to a French newspaper report.
The report in Saturday's Le Parisien, citing French and Belgian intelligence material and police recordings, lists repeated occasions when authorities allegedly failed to catch Abaaoud, even though he had been considered a major threat by several European intelligence services before the November 13 attacks that left 130 dead in the French capital.
US intelligence was also onto Abaaoud. President Barack Obama's envoy for the anti-Islamic State coalition, Brett McGuirk, said on Saturday that at as soon as he heard about the Paris attacks "we all assumed this was probably something that was planned by Abaaoud" from the Syrian IS stronghold of Raqqa.
Speaking to reporters in Brussels, McGuirk described the Paris attacks as unusually sophisticated. Abaaoud was killed in a police raid five days after the attacks by IS suicide bombers on a concert, stadium and cafes. Most of those killed in the Paris attacks were hostages in the Bataclan concert hall.
The news came as survivors and families of victims marked six months since the attacks, which shook the nation and prompted a state of emergency that is still in place. French authorities came under criticism immediately after the attacks for intelligence missteps that failed to prevent the bloodshed.
France had been under high alert since deadly shootings at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a Paris kosher market in January 2015.
By September 2015, Le Parisien reported, authorities had identified links between Abaaoud and thwarted attacks on a high-speed train and a church, and suspected he was plotting a big attack.
The report quotes a witness as saying Abaaoud asked him to find a concert or other easy target with a lot of people, with the goal of seizing hostages and dying while fighting police.
France joined the US-led coalition against IS in Iraq in 2014 but stayed out of Syria. President Francois Hollande changed that tack in September 2015, launching Syria airstrikes.
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