The announcement on Sunday that the plotters of last month' s Brussels terror attacks had originally intended to hit Paris again only heightened the concern among police and intelligence agencies that shadowy Islamic State networks could unleash new attacks at any time, not only in France and Belgium but in other European capitals.
As intelligence experts and officials took stock of what they have learned since the November 13 assaults in and around Paris, which killed 130 people, several things have come into focus. The scale of the Islamic State' s operations in Europe are still not known, but they appear to be larger and more layered than investigators at first realized; if the Paris and Brussels attacks are any model, the plotters will rely on local criminal networks in addition to committed extremists.
Read more from our special coverage on "BRUSSELS"
Even as the United States, its allies and Russia have killed leaders of the Islamic State, and have rolled back some of the extremist organization' s gains on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State appears to be posing a largely hidden and lethal threat across much of Europe.
When Belgian prosecutors announced that Mohamed Abrini, one of the men arrested on Friday, had confessed to being the mysterious third man in the Brussels Airport bombing, it seemed to mark a rare victory for Belgian law enforcement, which has struggled to track down extremists. But it also was a reminder of the ease with which the Islamic State' s operatives move across borders and the shifting roles that suspects play: According to prosecutors, Abrini was a logistician in the Paris attacks but was meant to be a bomber in the Brussels attack - except that his bomb failed to explode.
There are almost certainly similar cells that are active in non-French-speaking countries and that have not yet surfaced. Britain, Germany and Italy are thought to be high on the list of Islamic State targets.
It adds up to a long road ahead in Europe for law enforcement and intelligence agencies but also for citizens who are having to learn to adapt to an array of new security precautions and more intrusive surveillance, especially in public places.
"We are not finished yet with the job of finding everyone who is in this big network of Paris and Brussels," said Jean-Charles Brisard, the head of the French Center for the Analysis of Terrorism in Paris. "Every time progress is made, we add another few people to the list of people we are looking for."
It is sobering to look at the number of people believed to have some connection to the Paris and Brussels attacks: 36 are suspected of being active participants to varying degrees in organizing or carrying them out. Of those, 13 are dead, and most of the rest are in custody.
A handful have been released but are subject to conditions, like daily check-ins at a police station.
Others are probably lying low or on the run. What worries investigators is that many of the participants in the Paris-Brussels network were recruited by a preacher in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, Khalid Zerkani. He was tried twice in Belgium, accused of recruiting more than 50 young men to join the fight in Syria and helping to finance their journey to the Middle East.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
