Con Coughlin: Professionalism of terrorist hit stuns Europe

A witness who encountered the escaping Paris gunmen, quoted the attackers as saying: "You can tell the media that it's al-Qaeda in Yemen". Photo / AP

The most striking feature of the terrorist attack was the cool professionalism of the killers as they carried out the atrocity.

For the past few weeks, the French have been warned to be on the look-out for Islamist "lone wolf" attacks after a spate of incidents before Christmas, during which cars were driven at shoppers in Dijon and Nantes, and police were attacked by a man wielding a knife in Tours.

But the slaughter in Paris was anything but the work of a lone fanatic inspired to commit random acts of violence by the extreme ideology propagated by hate preachers in countries such as Syria and Iraq.

On the contrary, this was a carefully planned, well-executed operation undertaken by gunmen who selected their targets and carried out the murders with expert precision.

Indeed, there was initial speculation that, because the terrorists timed their attack to coincide with the magazine's weekly editorial meeting, they were professional hitmen rather than Islamist fanatics.

Yet the fact that the gunmen boasted to onlookers that they were from al-Qaeda in Yemen, shouted "We have avenged the Prophet" and targeted a magazine that had published controversial cartoons of Muhammad, led to the inevitable conclusion that this was an Islamist-related attack, albeit one displaying a level of expertise rarely seen on the European mainland.

Modern Islamist terror cells are far better organised than their predecessors, and now have the ability to carry out a wide range of operations, from last year's attack on Algeria's In Amenas gas complex, when hundreds were held hostage before being freed by special forces, to the advances made by Isis fighters as they conquered swathes of northern Iraq last year.

The sophistication of the terror groups is a relatively new phenomenon, though, in Europe, which is more used to radicalised young Muslims who seek martyrdom by carrying out suicide attacks.

Yet the French authorities will be interested in the fact that, far from sacrificing their own lives, the terrorists had plans to escape. They will also focus on their claim that they were affiliated to a Yemeni-based cell.

France has no shortage of enemies in the Islamic world. Twenty years ago, Paris was rocked by attacks on the Metro orchestrated by Algerian Islamist terrorists. More recently, France has been criticised for its involvement in military operations against Islamist militants in Mali, as well as Isis fighters in Syria and Iraq.

Yemen, on the other hand, is outside France's traditional sphere of influence. If the terrorists' claim that they are affiliated to the Yemeni al-Qaeda group proves to be true, one possibility could be that they were acting out of solidarity with other Islamist groups in the region.

Whatever the truth, the events in Paris show the challenge Western intelligence and security forces face in trying to keep the streets of Europe's cities safe.