The European Commission will submit in the next few weeks new proposals to fight terrorism following the deadly Islamist attack against a French magazine in Paris that killed 12 people, EU executive body’s President Jean-Claude Juncker said.
"I know from experience that one should not react on the moment to such events given the risk of doing either too much or too little," Juncker told a press conference in Riga, capital of Latvia, the country which is assuming the rotating EU presidency since January 1.
While stressing that counter-terrorism is mainly the responsibility of individual member states Juncker said the European Commission could play an important coordinating role.
EU Foreign Ministers are to meet in Brussels on 19 January and Interior Ministers will meet in Riga on 28 January to discuss counter-terrorism coordination efforts in response to the barbaric attack at the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper offices in the French capital.
In Brussels, commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud gave no details of the talks but said that the EU Commission will "throw its weight behind the negotiations" with a reluctant European Parliament on forging a Passenger Name Record (PNR) system.
The PNR would enable the 28 EU countries to collect and share data on all airline passengers in a bid to trace would-be jihadists.
EU counter-terrorism chief Gilles de Kerchove is a leading proponent of the PNR as a way to track EU citizens who travel to Syria and Iraq to wage jihad.
They are perceived as a potential threat to their home countries as they will return trained in the use of weapons.
Cherif Kouachi, the 32-year-old hunted along with his older brother Said for the attack on Charlie Hebdo, is a jihadist who has been well-known to French anti-terror police for many years.
Cherif had already been jailed in 2008 for his role in sending fighters to Iraq.
French investigators found a dozen Molotov cocktails and two jihadist flags in the getaway car used in Wednesday’s massacre.
French special operations forces deployed Thursday in a northern town where the two brothers are believed to be located, a police source said.
The jihadist flags and gas bombs were found in the abandoned black Citroen used by the attackers to speed away from the offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly after they carried out the assault.
“This shows their Islamist radicalization and that they had possibly planned other acts with the petrol bombs,” the source said.
RAID, the anti-terrorist unit of the French police force, and the GIGN, a paramilitary special operations unit, deployed in Villers-Cotterets in the northern Aisne region “where a car was abandoned after being used by the two suspects, who were identified by a witness,” the source told AFP.
Sometimes going by the name Abu Issen, Cherif Kouachi was part of the “Buttes-Chaumont network” that helped send would-be jihadists to join Al Qaeda in Iraq during the US-led invasion in the mid-2000s.
He was arrested in 2005 just before he was due to fly to Syria and on to Iraq — and was later sentenced to three years in prison, including an 18-month suspended sentence.