Black Tuesday in Europe: special services fail

“The terrorists who organized the terrorist attacks in Brussels were very seriously prepared,” Adalbi Shkhagoshev, member of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, commented on the attacks committed on March 22nd in Brussels.

“It is not very difficult for well-trained people to carry out a terrorist attack in any city,” Shkhagoshev says, as a professional. In the early 1990s he was the senior officer in the Department for the Struggle against Organized Crime in the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria; he lost both hands during the detection of a criminal.

According to Shkhagoshev, the work of the security services was not satisfying: “Knowing the operating status of the terrorist cell in Belgium, it was possible to work in a different way. They were warned and somehow were not able to react in time. The whole world is warned that there is a network built, a radical pyramid. According to the figures of the special services of the European countries, there are 2500 active representatives of ISIS, at least the people who support them very seriously, they are financed, trained. This is a whole army. It is not just a particular cell. Therefore, it is possible to carry out not just a local terrorist act, when a suicide bomber blows up, commits such a crime, but there are dozens, at least, of people who were involved in this terrorist attack.”

Shkhagoshev thinks the way out is consolidation of the security services: “Full consolidation is not possible due to the different geopolitical problems that there are now in the relations between the West and Russia, the EU and Russia. However, we will apply tactics of forced cooperation. We will make them work together like in Syria, for example. We didn’t become friends with the United States, but we are solving this problem together now, because it is just an offer you cannot refuse. There is simply no other way.”

Shkhagoshev thinks it is necessary to open a second front in the fight against the recruiters’ network: “Now the construction of the so-called Caliphate is not possible. Organized resistance moves slowly. And this means that an order was given to the recruiters, ‘Let's excite the whole world, but we will find another territory." Our legislation is quite serious. Particularly, it has no analogues in the world, because crimes are being committed since the 90s, and we are improving the laws. But I support a tightening of punishment for the recruiters. A terrorist, if we are talking about him, gets life imprisonment, in some countries, the death penalty. A recruiter receives several years, up to 5, up to 10 years. Who deserves a life sentence more? A terrorist who commits a crime, or a person who has recruited dozens of people who will commit crimes? A recruiter has to get a life sentence.”