Al-Qaeda sleepers

French counter-espionage chief warns of sleeper Al-Qaeda cells in Europe, waiting for the order to launch the next wave of attacks.

Jean-Jacques Pascal, head of the French counter-espionage services, has warned about the existence of “sleeper” Al-Qaeda terrorist cells in an interview given to the Washington Post.

Pascal stated that the Al-Qaeda network is made up of two layers – a hard nucleus funded directly from the central organisation and other more independent satellite organisations, more autonomous and harder to discover.

These semi-independent groups, according to Pascal, are involved in illicit activities such as forgery of documents. He claimed that these “sleepers” pose a real threat, due to the fact that they are waiting for instructions to perform the next terrorist act, undetected and anonymous.

Emilie ACQUITAINE PRAVDA.Ru PARIS FRANCE