Sun Feb 21, 2016 16:31:28
Thousands of ISIS trained militants are at large in Europe and waiting to strike as the continent faces its highest terror threat in over a decade, the EU's police chief has warned.
Between 3,000 and 5,000 EU citizens have secretly returned to the continent after being trained by the terrorists in the Middle East according to Rob Wainwright, the British head of EU police agency Europol for the past seven years.
He said: "Europe is currently facing the highest terror threat in more than ten years.
"We can expect ISIS or other religious terror groups to stage an attack somewhere in Europe with the aim of achieving mass casualties among the civilian population."
The growing number "presents EU member states with completely new challenges", warned the former senior player in the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS).
But he played down fears that terrorists are using the European migrant crisis to infiltrate the continent as asylum seekers.
He said: "There is no concrete evidence terrorists are systematically using the flow of refugees to infiltrate Europe."
This week it emerged two men being held in Austria in connection with the November Paris attacks confessed to coming into Europe posing as refugees.
The duo sneaked through the continent after arriving in Greece on a boat with 30 to 40 others, including two of the terrorist gunman who carried out the slaughter on the streets of the French capital.
Salzburg prosecutors confirmed the 28-year-old Algerian and 34-year-old Pakistani suspects, who have not been named, were arrested at a refugee shelter on December 10.
They were stopped weeks before the bloody atrocity by officials who noticed they were travelling on false passport. But the eventual attackers slipped through the net, taking advantage of the Schengen free-movement zone to ghost on towards France, Express reported.
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