It has been three years since a terror attacks in Paris killed 130 people. There were 20 minutes between the first attack at the Stade de France, and the last at the Bataclan concert hall, but authorities had no way of directly warning people out in the area about what was happening.

In major emergency incidents across Europe the only official warning systems in place that can reach people outside their homes are air raid sirens left over from the second World War, like reported by wired.co.uk.

Now the European Parliament has decided to change this. It has approved legislation for member states to create a ‘Reverse-112’ system, where emergency alerts can be sent directly to phones in the relevant area.

These systems are common in the US and elsewhere, but only four EU countries – Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Lithuania – have suitable nationwide coverage in place.

For the others, emergency warning systems are a patchwork of technologies that can differ vastly in coverage, even within the same country. Emergency television and radio systems do exist, but they’re often fragmented by region, or built on antiquated technology from the Cold War-era or earlier.

Although the Reverse-112 has been approved by the European Parliament it still needs to be rubber-stamped by the EU Council in early December, and then member states will have three and a half years to implement it. By then, the UK probably won’t be a member of the EU, so it’s not entirely clear what will happen here.

In fact, it’s not entirely clear what system we have in place now. The UK’s National Advanced Warning System was completed in 2003 to replace sirens, but used analogue technology at a time when most people were switching to digital televisions and radios, and was decommissioned in 2012. Since then, the government has kept its mass-alert plans a careful secret.

Some authorities use social media, but that risks missing out swathes of the population, and relies on people in the affected area checking their phones.

It’s also rife with incorrect information and rumour. During recent forest fires in Greece, for example, Twitter was the main source of information. “There were a lot of rumours, and it was so difficult to find what was true and what was not,” says Petros Kremonoas of the European Emergency Number Association, which has been a strong advocate of Reverse-112 legislation.

“Current alerting systems take a long time to disperse through the population,” says professor John Preston, a sociologist at the University of Essex and co-editor of a book on city evacuations. “People aren’t all watching TV – they might be watching Netflix, and even with social media you’re generally in the same network so it can take a long time for information to get between groups.”

Research by Nick Jones and colleagues at Imperial College London has found that an emergency television broadcast would take about half an hour to reach 50 per cent of the population if broadcast at 20:00, and as long as eight hours if broadcast at 04:00. In France, the government created a public warning app, SAIP, but as of June 2017 only 500,000 people had installed it.

Smartphone alerts offer a much more versatile alternative and far-reaching alternative. A recent test of the Presidential Address system in the United States aimed to reach 275 million devices, for example.

Messages can be targeted only to people in the affected area, and by working with network providers they could even be customised for particularly vulnerable people in evacuation scenarios. They can also reach tourists, who may not have an emergency warning app installed or be following the right social media accounts – not everyone who died in the Westminster Bridge attack was a UK resident, for example.

There are two options for implementing such a system. The first is a traditional SMS message, using cellphone towers to send the message only to people in the relevant geographical area. The second is via a ‘cell broadcast,’ which works in largely the same way as an SMS, but appears on a user’s phone slightly differently. “Both of them are able to reach people in a specific geographic area and inform them in a reliable manner quickly enough,” says Kremonas.

Both systems have their strengths and drawbacks. SMS messages won’t be differentiated from other texts, so could be missed if a user has their phone on silent, or ignored as spam. “Trust is obviously a key issue here,” says James Rubin, who conducts research into public health crises at King’s College London. “Many people are used to deleting spam on sight and there is a risk SMS messages will be treated the same way.”

The way cell broadcasts are presented depends on their network provider, but they’re generally much more prominent than standard text messages, flashing up an alert on screen and often playing a sound or vibrating even if users have their phone on silent.

The UK conducted trials in Glasgow, Yorkshire and Suffolk in 2013, and concluded that SMS would be the better option, partly because they’re cheaper to implement and make use of existing networks. Another advantage is that unlike cell broadcasts they allow users to be individually identified and sent messages even after they’ve left the area. That could prove particularly useful in case of a chemical weapons attack like the one on the Skripals in Salisbury, where people in the area at the time might need to be contacted for medical check-ups.

However, text messages also more vulnerable to spoofing. Even cell broadcasts aren’t infallible. “It’s not that hard to hack into mass alerting systems,” says Preston. “The emergency alert system in the US has been hacked several times at a regional level, with people saying there’s been a zombie attack.”

It’s therefore vital that authorities send out their message by as many channels as possible. The first thing people do when they get an alert was to try and verify it. “When a message is given out, it is important to use multiple routes to disseminate it,” says Rubin.

“That maximises the chances of people receiving the warning in the first place and also seeing the message confirmed when they go to check it. Anything that adds an extra route that gets messages out to people is a good thing.”

Europeans will be sent official alerts on their mobile phones if they are near a terrorist attack or natural disaster under an EU plan to replace the traditional emergency siren and reduce the risk of fake news causing chaos, like reported by theguardian.com.

The lack of early warning for passersby at the time of the Westminster and Paris attacks, and the risk to lives posed by unofficial and inaccurate communications, prompted the move.

MEPs are expected to pass legislation on Wednesday obliging EU member states to implement the so-called Reverse 112 system which will alert people to threats and advise how to stay safe.

Similar systems exist in the US, but many European countries still use the same emergency sirens used in the second world war to alert citizens of an impending danger.

Where there have been moves to introduce modern systems by national governments, it is said to have been painfully slow.

The budget of the French authorities for alerting people via telephone networks was just €1.78m in 2017. The budget for updating the siren system that year was over €35m.

UK to adopt EU laws on combating terrorism and money laundering
Read more
In a large-scale emergency, a lack of official instructions, fake news and rumours are said to be a threat to rescue operations.

European governments will be asked to work with mobile phone providers to bring in the new public warning system in which text messages will tell people the nature of the threat, its location, and the best next steps to take.

Benoit Vivier, public affairs manager at the Brussels-based NGO the European Emergency Number Association (EENA), which works to improve member states’ crisis management, said: “Take any of the recent large emergencies in Europe –whether man-made or natural – and you will realise in most cases modern public warning was not in place.

“We have the means and the technology, but so far we have largely failed to put them [to] good use. The new legislation ensures that from now on we do. This is an excellent step forward for the safety of Europeans.”

Levent Altan, executive director at Victim Support Europe, said: “We want a Europe that puts safety first and the new legislation is an important step to that direction. Modern public warning will provide people with the right information at the right time, leading to less victims and more lives saved.”

EU member states will have 42 months after the legislation comes into force to establish the emergency system. Should the British government secure an agreement on the terms of its withdrawal from the EU, the legislation will come into force during the transition period during which regulations from Brussels will be automatically adopted by Westminster.

Dita Charanzová, the Czech MEP leading on the Reverse 112 legislation, said: “As we mark the Paris attacks, and hope that such events never happen again, we must better prepare ourselves if they do.

“Europe’s new mobile public warning system will be an important tool in making sure that citizens get accurate information and instructions.

“Quick, reliable information will help to save lives. I am proud to have had an important role in getting this adopted and I only hope that member states will put the system in place even before the deadline to act.”

A crime ring with links to Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah accused of trafficking cocaine for a Colombian drug cartel and laundering the profits to buy weapons in Syria for the group is to go on trial in Paris on Tuesday, like reported by thenational.ae.

The main agent accused of being the cell’s ringleader as a middleman for Hezbollah is Mohamad Noureddine, a 44-year-old Lebanese businessman with interests in real estate and jewellery arrested after an international investigation that took in seven countries, including France, Belgium, Germany and Italy.

Police arrested him in France in 2016 after a tip-off from US counter-narcotics agents. The US has sanctioned him for his alleged ties to Hezbollah and acting as a money launderer for its financial arm.

The ring is alleged to have raised funds for Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Syria where they are fighting alongside the forces of President Bashar Al Assad. The financial arm of Hezbollah uses supporters in the Lebanese diaspora around the world to raise funds.

The ring’s members are accused of operating throughout South America, Europe and the Middle East since 2012 and using the ancient banking system known as hawala to transfer drug money without trace using trusted brokers.

The proceeds of their drug trafficking were laundered to Europe, where they were collected, then sent to Lebanon and then on to Colombian traffickers.

The investigation is known as the “Cedar Affair” because of Lebanon’s national tree.

Investigators listening in on phone conversations deduced that a “Mercedes 250” referred to a pickup of 250,000 euros, while a “truck” referred to one million euros.

The “oven” was a reference to the Netherlands, and Belgium was known as the “mill”.

The collected cash was then used to buy luxury jewellery, watches and cars which were resold in Lebanon or West Africa.

The freshly laundered funds were transferred to the Colombians through currency exchange or money transfer bureaus.

“Hezbollah needs individuals like Mohamad Noureddine to launder criminal proceeds for use in terrorism and political destabilisation,” Adam J Szubin, then under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said at the time of his arrest.

The trial, if Mr Noureddine is found guilty of involvement in cocaine trafficking for Hezbollah arms purchases, could be highly embarrassing a group that preaches religious piety at home in Lebanon.

Mr Noureddine has admitted to organising pickups of cash but pleaded ignorance about the provenance of the funds.

He has staunchly denied that some of the money could have been destined for Hezbollah as the DEA has suggested.

William Julie, a lawyer for one of the defendants who is familiar with cross-border cases handled by both US and European investigators, said such cooperation is “indispensable” but often leads only to “second-tier individuals who shouldn’t be caught up in the crackdown”.

His client, who is considered close to Noureddine, has strongly denied any wrongdoing. He was detained for 18 months before being freed on bail.

None of the defendants have criminal records.

The trial is scheduled to wind up on November 28.

Several parties in Denmark want to investigate whether the Iranian Embassy in Copenhagen had anything to do with the possible assassination plot against Iranian exiles that closed down much of the country in late September, like reported by cphpost.dk.

Should any personnel attached to the embassy have any connection to the so-called ‘death lists’, they should be expelled immediately, the politicians maintain.

“I think that some clear indications have surfaced regarding a specific death list from the Iranian Embassy concerning some people they want to remove from the surface of the earth. And we simply need to get to the bottom of that,” Michael Aastrup Jensen, the spokesperson for foreign affairs for Venstre, told Dr Nyheder.

“As I see it, the only response would be to toss them out of the country, because it is completely unacceptable.”

The plot thickens

Jyllands-Posten newspaper has allegedly come into possession of a pamphlet from the Iranian Embassy in which several Iranians living in exile have been stamped as terrorists.

Two former intelligence agency heads consider the pamphlet as some kind of hit-list, as one of the names on the list was a former head of the opposition group ASMLA, who was killed in the Netherlands. Three names on the pamphlet are Iranians living in exile in Denmark.

Denmark has called home its ambassador to Iran as a result of the case and the Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to Denmark to explain the situation. Thus far, the embassy has denied any involvement in the plot.

The case also took another turn yesterday, when three members of ASMLA were arrested and charged with advocating terrorism – more specifically the armed attack at a military parade in the southwest of Iran that killed 25 people on September 22. They were later released.

Like all proud grandparents, the first thing Lejla does when we meet for coffee, at a chain café in a northern suburb of Sarajevo, is pull out her phone to show me photos of her grandchildren, like reported by politico.eu.

Here’s Muhammad, age 2, blond and blue-eyed, in a teddy bear-print sweater; Ayesha, 4, holding a pet rabbit; their mother, Lejla’s 22-year-old daughter, Sara, in a black veil; and another of Muhammad, shirtless, with a belly distended from hunger.

These aren’t ordinary snapshots. Sara is a so-called ISIS widow, one of several thousand women whose husbands have died in the Islamic State, leaving them stranded in the Levant, often with young children. (She has been given a pseudonym, as have the other women identified by first names in this story.) The photos she sent her mother were taken in the Roj Camp for Islamic State refugees in northern Syria, where she and her children have lived for more than a year, in the hope of being repatriated.

Sara left Bosnia for Syria in March 2015 with her husband, a fundamentalist Muslim she met on the internet.

Lejla begged her not to go. She had been at the frontlines of the Bosnian War in the 1990s as an aid worker and knew what life in a war zone is like.

“It was a huge shock when she suddenly messaged me from Syria,” says Lejla. “I had just come around to her marriage, but this was unimaginable.”

Lejla, distraught about her daughter’s situation, did not feel she could turn to the Bosnian government for help. But she allowed herself to feel cautiously hopeful after connecting with the families of two other Bosnian women who live in the 1,400-person camp. Together, they’re lobbying the government to repatriate the three women and their nine children.

The widows live in a kind of purgatory, their precarious position a result of the complicated question of what to do with returning foreign fighters and their families, who may or may not have been radicalized.

Officials are using the situation’s complexity as a delay tactic, says Lejla. “They should be honest and say, ‘We don’t want them back,’ or else give me the papers to go to Syria and get my daughter back myself!”

Bosnia-Herzegovina — about half of whose population is Muslim — has seen some 300 people join the conflict in Syria and Iraq, making it one of the top per capita exporters of foreign fighters in Europe. They were recruited by various means, including extremist preachers, targeted video campaigns, and social media.

The phenomenon is also linked to Bosnia’s own history of attracting foreign fighters. During the Bosnian War in the ’90s, foreign fighters came to support various ethnic factions and Bosniak Muslims were supported by 1,800-3,000 foreigners, mostly from Iran, Afghanistan, and Arab countries. Some of them stayed on after the war and propagated fundamentalist or radical beliefs.

As the flow of people actively leaving the Balkans — and Europe more widely — to fight for the Islamic State has largely petered out, the most pressing counterterrorism concerns now regard repatriation, rehabilitation and incarceration.

At least 50 “foreign fighters” have returned from the Islamic State to Bosnia, according to Vlado Azinović, a security analyst at the Atlantic Initiative, a Sarajevo think tank.

“All returnees are being closely watched, but thus far they have produced very limited security-related threats,” he says.

Bosnia has cracked down on extremist preachers and mosques since 2015 and brought most Muslim groups into the fold of the wider Islamic community. It has also stepped up efforts to prosecute aspiring and returning foreign fighters.

But the country does not have a deradicalization program in place for them, “nor would they commit themselves to such programs even if they existed,” says Azinović.

The ISIS widows’ case is complicated because they claim that they did not actually take part in fighting and thus would likely not face trial.

The women’s relatives all say they believe there was an element of coercion involved in their migration to ISIS-held territory with their husbands.

Still, in the eyes of the government, they constitute a potential threat, as do their children, who are officially stateless. Bosnian authorities have demanded that DNA testing be carried out on these children before any decision on their citizenship is made, according to Azinović.

Alema Dolamić is one of the other Bosnian women with a family member in Syria. A thin woman with bleached blonde hair and high cheekbones, she calls the Bosnian foreign ministry every fortnight and has driven to Sarajevo five times, hoping to get face time with an official.

She has been in contact with Bosnia’s State Investigation and Protection Agency for three years — ever since her sister, Alina, now 32, left for the Islamic State in 2015.

“Other people are embarrassed about having this ‘ISIS connection’ in their family,” says Dolamić, at her home in Matuzići, a small town two hours north of Sarajevo. “But not me.”

Alina, like Sara, met her fundamentalist husband on Facebook. In 2014, she moved with him to Vienna, then suddenly migrated to Syria. When her husband died during fighting in the summer of 2017, Alina was moved to a special house designated for widows and single mothers.

She and four other women paid a smuggler to help them cross the border into Turkey, where they hoped to make contact with their home embassies. But the smuggler disappeared with their money, leaving them alone for days in the Syrian desert, until American soldiers found them and took them to the refugee camp at Roj.

When Alina messaged her sister the names of her two Bosnian campmates, Dolamić made contact with both of their mothers: Lejla in Sarajevo, and Senija Muhamadavić, a housewife and war widow who lives in northwestern Bosnia.

Muhamadavić, who lives in a modest two-story home near the town of Cazin, has a similar story to tell about her 30-year-old daughter, Mija.

“We were not religious at all, so it was surprising when she suddenly got married … and started wearing the niqab [the full face-and-body veil] and stopped talking to her male family members,” she says.

Mija left for Syria in April 2015, and became a widow several months later when her first husband was killed in an explosion at a bomb factory. She remarried twice in Syria, not an uncommon practice among women in her position. Eventually she became fed up with her life there and tried to cross over to Turkey in the same ill-fated group as Alina.

“I see some similarities between these three girls,” says Lejla, wiping her eyes beneath her glasses. “They all came under the spell of the internet, they were all young and beautiful … and I think they all realized that they have made a huge mistake.”

The three families update each other via WhatsApp. Dolamić is usually the one organizing and informing the others of progress with officials.

The government has been slow to respond, shuffling Dolamić’s requests between different ministries (information, foreign affairs, security) and embassies (Jordan, Turkey).

Last month, the foreign ministry finally transferred Alina’s case file to the security ministry, which Dolamić says must now send a representative to the camp in Syria and personally evacuate each widow and her children. She has not been advised of a concrete timeline of when that might happen. Neither ministry could be reached for comment.

“If we don’t say anything, our government will not do anything,” said Dolamić.

There is a Red Cross presence at the camp but medical facilities are extremely basic. Alina’s 8-year-old daughter recently contracted tuberculosis, and she told her sister that days go by without drinking water.

Dolamić has been assured by authorities that Alina will not face criminal charges if she returns to Bosnia, she says, and she expects the same to apply to the other two widows.

Even so, there will be few resources for them if they return: Unemployment in Bosnia is extremely high, at 36 percent. Even without the added complication of their particular backgrounds, it would be hard to find a job.

Readjusting to small-town life in Bosnia would also present a challenge for her sister, including “great stigma” from their community, Dolamić acknowledged.

“She made a big mistake and she has suffered a lot,” she said. “But she deserves to come home.”

Denmark said on Tuesday it suspected an Iranian intelligence service had tried to carry out a plot to assassinate an Iranian Arab opposition figure on its soil, like reported by reuters.com.

A Norwegian citizen of Iranian background was arrested in Sweden on Oct. 21 in connection with the plot and extradited to Denmark, Swedish security police said.

The attack was meant to target the leader of the Danish branch of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), Danish intelligence chief Finn Borch Andersen said.

ASMLA seeks a separate state for ethnic Arabs in Iran’s oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan.

“We are dealing with an Iranian intelligence agency planning an attack on Danish soil. Obviously, we can’t and won’t accept that,” Andersen told a news conference.

Iran’s foreign ministry was not immediately available for comment on Tuesday, a public holiday in the Islamic Republic.

Andersen said the arrested Norwegian citizen had denied charges in court of helping a foreign intelligence service plot an assassination in Denmark.

Iranian Arabs are a minority in mainly ethnic Persian Iran, and some see themselves as under Persian occupation and want independence or autonomy.

Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said on Twitter that the reported attack plot was “completely unacceptable”.

“The government will respond to Iran and is speaking with European partners on further measurements,” Samuelsen said.

On Sept. 28, Danish police shut two major bridges to traffic and halted ferry services from Denmark to Sweden and Germany in a nationwide police operation to prevent a possible attack.

A few days earlier, the Norwegian suspect had been observed photographing and watching the Denmark home of the ASMLA leader, police said.

In November 2017, Ahmad Mola Nissi, an Iranian exile who established ASMLA, was shot dead in the Netherlands. The Danish security service then bolstered police protection of the ASMLA leader in Denmark and two associates.

Last month, Iran summoned the envoys of the Netherlands, Denmark and Great Britain over a Sept. 22 shooting attack on a military parade in Khuzestan in which 25 people were killed.

Iran accused the three countries of harbouring Iranian opposition groups.

Another Arab opposition group, the Ahwaz National Resistance, and the Islamic State militant group both claimed responsibility for the parade attack, though neither has provided conclusive evidence to back up their claim.

Last week, diplomatic and security sources said France had expelled an Iranian diplomat over a failed plot to carry out a bomb attack on a Paris-area rally by an exiled Iranian opposition group.

More than 80 British women who married ISIS soldiers could be heading back to the UK, it has been claimed, according to metro.co.uk.

The women are currently being kept in detention camps in northern Syria which are controlled by Kurdish forces who are determined to deport them back home. France this week agreed to accepting 150 children but not their parents and Belgium and Denmark are in talks about bringing back their citizens.

A Sunday Times investigation has revealed among the 80 women who could be repatriated to the UK were part of a deadly terror cell which had links to Jihadi John (Mohammed Emwazi), who performed and filmed executions for ISIS before being killed.

Kurdish leader Abdul Karim Omar who is in charge of repatriation of prisoners claimed a ‘good number’ of the 2,627 men, women and children being held were British. He said: ‘We want to hand them over. We will not let them stay here.’

A British security official said: ‘The vast majority of those returning to Britain from Syria are women and children. The more concerning cases – particularly the men – have not been returning.

‘But we will speak to everyone because they may have been involved in terrorist activity.’ An estimated 900 British terror subjects went to Syria and Iraq during the war and there is believed to be 360 still there.