In light of the recent foiled terrorist attack on a Paris-bound express train, the spotlight has been shone on the susceptibility of the European rail network to terrorism. As the article below highlights, the opportunities for companies such as DTI are massive and will only grow in the years and decades to come.
“We are now faced with unpredictable terrorism,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French security consultant and terrorism expert. “Terrorists henceforth will be choosing soft targets, those where there is little security,” he said. “And that’s why he chose a train — because there is little security.”
The shortcomings of the French security list were highlighted on Sunday by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front Party here. Ms. Le Pen called for the expulsion from France of terrorism suspects on the security threat list, saying there were “serious weaknesses” with the system. Some antiterrorism experts agreed that control of the movements of suspect individuals with residency permits across European borders — including those on lists — was weak. That played into the inherent weaknesses in controlling rail passengers, they said.
Because of the European Union’s borderless frontiers, there are no “systematic controls on Europeans” or those holding resident cards, “only on foreigners,” Mr. Brisard said. And that is “the real problem,” he said.
With determined jihadists, 40 million passengers daily and 100,000 trains, securing Europe’s rail networks is a challenge unlikely to be met anytime soon, if ever, according to security experts.
The problem is that train stations — 3,000 of them in France alone — are open spaces, largely uncontrolled, where non-passengers can mingle freely with those getting on board. Baggage is checked in only a few places, and for very few trains — for the cross-Channel Eurostar, and for some trains in Spain after the terrorist attacks there that killed around 200 people in 2004.
Europe’s trains, stations and thousands of miles of train tracks are very different from the tightly controlled space of airports, the security experts said. Trains are on the way to becoming the logical soft target of choice, they said.
“Among the soft targets, the rail system will be a major one, because today they are so unprotected,” said Bertrand Monnet, a French terrorism and risk expert. For terrorists, “For years their symbolic target was air transport, but that has become very difficult,” Trains are “an evident target,” he said. “Millions of people would say, ‘It could have been me,’ ” Mr. Monnet said. “The question was not whether, but when.”
The half-dozen big train stations in Paris are like villages, with a constant stream of unchecked humanity pouring through them every day. Decades old, they were designed with none of today’s security problems in mind. Sporadic patrols by armed soldiers constitute a check, but a very limited one, say the experts. One million passengers a day take the French high-speed train alone, and three million take the suburban train network.
“Access to the platforms over the whole network, to train stations, these are open spaces. It’s not like airports,” said Marc Ivaldi, a European transport expert at the Institute of Industrial Economics, in Toulouse.
“Even if you are not traveling, you have access. It is a huge space, and one that is very difficult to make secure,” Mr. Ivaldi said. “You could put cameras in, but you can’t imagine a system like airports.”
DTI Price at posting:
30.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
