An underage Chechen migrant boy was arrested this week by French authorities after he had pledged on social media to join Islamic State.
The Chechen migrant, who attended Ingres College in Montauban, was arrested earlier this week and placed into custody at a police station in Toulouse. In the city of Beziers, another Chechen man, whose age has yet to be made public, was also arrested charges of conspiracy to join a terrorist organisation, La Dépêche reports.
Officers of the DGSI, the Directorate General of Internal Security, France’s domestic intelligence agency, raided the family apartment of the younger Chechen who has Russian nationality and seized various electronic devices including computers.
According to investigators, the Chechen filmed himself dressed up as a jihadist fighter swearing allegiance to the Islamic State terror group and posting the video on an unnamed social media platform.
According to historian Christian Osthold, Chechens in neighbouring Germany who also had links to Islamic State were starting to dominate the Islamist scene in the region of Brandenburg late last year.
A report from the Brandenburg State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the state’s domestic spy agency went as far to claim jihadists from Chechnya were using Germany, “as a rest and retreat area.”
Underage jihadists and radicalised children have also been noted as a serious threat by some like Wolfgang Trusheim, head of the Frankfurt state police, who, in 2016 warned that children to radical Salafist parents posed a future terror risk.
There have also been claims that the Islamic State leadership have considered sending radicalised children to Europe posing as asylum seekers in order to carry out attacks.
Captured French jihadist Jonathan Geffroy spent time with the most senior French members of the terror group, Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, and said the pair spoke of such a tactic.
“I know that future external operations will be committed by children who grew up in the area and who, after adolescence, will be sent to the West,” Geffroy said.