EUROPE: Cyprus worried about returning foreign fighters from Syria

Possible radicalised foreign fighters arriving through migratory routes like Cyprus, as well as the use of EU databases to address this security risk was raised by Cypriot Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou in Brussels.

The Minister said: "by reviewing measures that have been promoted by the Commission over the last 4-5 years and have been applied to counter terrorism …it was decided to pursue the full implementation and evaluation of these measures in order to make them more effective and a special reference was made to the high numbers of returning fighters from the conflict zones and the measures to be taken to assess their hazard ".

Ioannou added: "as Cyprus I briefed fellow Ministers on the migratory flows that we have received lately and especially that the overwhelming majority of people arriving lately from Syria are males with most of them aged between 23- 35 which makes them high risk."

He stressed the need to upgrade the possibilities of exploiting the available security information so that an assessment can be carried out to determine the risk these people pose and “how to handle them, both for our own security and for dealing with issues of radicalisation".

"During the debate, all Member States agreed on the need to use the tools offered by Europol, in particular IRMA platforms, to effectively investigate all these cases," Ioannou said.

He said there is a need "for the EU to open negotiations with the US to reach an agreement on cross-border access to electronic evidence, since the US is the country in which most of the largest companies have web services."