National security committee head calls for European counter-terrorism force

Budapest, December 9 (MTI) – Europe is in need of an integrated intelligence and counter-terrorism unit, as the current level of cooperation among law enforcement agencies and secret services is inadequate, the head of parliament’s national security committee said on Wednesday.

Europe needs to act immediately to significantly improve the flow of information among its intelligence agencies, Zsolt Molnar told journalists after the committee’s session.

Molnar said it was clear that the European Union and most of its member states did not have adequate laws in place to prevent terror attacks. Hungary also needs to amend its criminal code to apply stricter punishments for cyberterrorism or the financing of terrorist groups, he said.

Molnar said Hungary has been contacted by several western European states regarding the return of migrants to Hungary, which he said demonstrated that “Dublin III has failed and there is no regulation to replace it with”. He said the intention of these countries to deport migrants to Hungary also demonstrates that “Hungary would be far worse off” if migrants were distributed this way rather than along a general quota scheme, since the country “may end up having to accept tens or hundreds of thousands of people.”

Concerning the arrest of a Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement member in Romania on suspicion of intending to set off a bomb on that country’s national holiday, Molnar said the committee knows little about the case. He said it was up to Romanian investigators to establish whether it was a real threat or only a trumped-up case.

Referring to the matter of the Hungarian armed forces having sold thousands of rocket-propelled weapons to a hunting shop in Hungary, Molnar said the defence ministry’s weapons sales are carried out through public tenders in accordance with the law. He said there was no way the weapons sold to the shop could have made their way to terrorist organisations.

Citing defence ministry contracts from 2013 and 2014, Bence Tordai of the opposition Dialogue for Hungary (PM) party revealed last week that the shop had bought 1,357 air launched rockets, 83 nose guns and 52 airborne rockets from the Hungarian army for 7.5 million forints (EUR 23,800).

Molnar insisted that the matter did not harm national security interests, adding that it was not the national security committee’s job to discuss or assess the purchase price.

He said the threat of terrorism in Hungary has not risen, adding, however, that an EU and NATO member state taking part in a mission in Iraq’s Kurdistan region would “never be 100 percent safe”.

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters