Politic?

Pyromania

The stench of death will not leave their noses as long as they remain at the forefront of the Crusaders’ campaign, dare to curse our prophet, boast of a war on Islam in France, and strike Muslims in the lands of the caliphate with warplanes that were of no use to them in the streets and rotten alleys of Paris."
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

AP Photo/Thibault Camus Rescue workers and medics work by victims in a Paris restaurant, Friday, 13 November.

The Paris prosecutor has been working overtime to find answers to a puzzling lapse in vital intelligence. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, thought to be the mastermind representing Islamic State's determination to score international news through an audacious series of attacks in France, has been discovered through telephone analysis to have returned to the scene of the crime/s, so to speak.

Somewhat like pyromaniacs, so enjoying the conflagration that they themselves set, they are irresistibly drawn to return, to witness the flames throwing themselves at the sky while they consume the setting.

In Abdelhamid Abaaoud's case, it seems he remained in the area and returned to the vicinity within mere minutes of President Francois Hollande's sympathetic visit in offer of support to victims and police even before the terrorists were destroyed by police at the Bataclan theatre. That piece of information should give ample reason for startled pause to both authorities and French intelligence relating to the usefulness of their vigilance.

There was the main villain, skulking in the background among the throngs of stricken Parisians even while police were still in the process of freeing hostages on November 13, a day that will be forever recalled in the annals of the Republic's defence of itself. Not having sufficiently partaken of the deep, dark pleasures inherent in viewing the destruction that his plans had executed, it seems he also went along to the area where he and two others fired on people in cafes and restaurants at the 10th and 11th arrondissements.

The massacres completed on schedule and hugely successfully, it seems this man strolled about unconcernedly, taking pleasure in the scenes that he helped to create; lakes of human flesh and blood, and traumatized people still dashing about hoping to be spared. The Paris prosecutor, Francois Molins, stated that Abaaoud had taken a Metro in his return to downtown Paris. He was tracked through the telephone he was using, detected in the 10th, 11th and 12th districts.

That tracking found him as well, through his telephone, at the Bataclan concert hall at the very time that the attacks were ongoing. "He revisited the area while the BRI [elite police unit] was still on the scene", said Mr. Molins. Is that brazenly cool-headed, or is it not?

This man, his immediate task completed, retired to plan another day's events, it would seem. Investigators seem convinced that Abaaoud and another man as yet unidentified but who died along with the major culprit during a police raid on a Saint-Denis apartment days after the attack, were in the final stages of planning another spectacular attack in Paris. This time targeting the capital's La Defense business district, and November 18 or 19 the dates chosen.