French lawmakers have recommended that the nation overhaul its intelligence services by merging the agencies into a unified organization after a parliamentary commission report found systematic failures during the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
The lawmakers who headed the commission said during a news conference Tuesday that overlapping agencies with sometimes conflicting interests led to communication failures, the BBC reported.
"Faced with the threat of international terrorism we need to be much more ambitious ... in terms of intelligence," commission president Georges Fenech said. "Today we don’t measure up to those who are attacking us."
The parliamentary inquiry was launched in response to the January 2015 attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris that killed 17 people and the coordinated ISIS assault in the city that left 130 people dead in November.
The commission said France’s six intelligence agencies should be fused into one, similar to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center.
The committee additionally called for enhanced intelligence sharing between European agencies across borders. Several of the jihadists who attacked Paris had been flagged by French or Belgian authorities ahead of the attacks because of criminal records or signs of radicalization, the New York Times reported.
All three of the terrorists who attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on Nov. 13 were known to security services, but were able to escape because of fragmented communication, Fenech said.
Salah Abdeslam, one of the key assailants in the November attacks, had been stopped at France’s border the day after the assault, but he was released because Belgian authorities did not notify police in time that he had ties to jihadist groups.
France remains under a state of emergency declared by President Francois Hollande in November.