According to the newspaper, the Syrian authorities alerted the Damascus office of Interpol about the stolen passports as early as in 2014.
At least two suspected participants of the Paris attacks easily made their way into Western Europe via the “Balkan route” using forged passports paired with Greek border authorities failing to check their passports with the Schengen Information System’s database.
Moreover, agents of the German BND intelligence service had repeatedly met with their Syrian colleagues in Damascus, Welt am Sonntag wrote.
Burkhard Lischka, a domestic policy expert with the Social Democratic Party’s faction in Bundestag, said that Germany and Syria “have shared interests and that it would be wrong not to work together amid the existing terrorist threat and the presence of German troops in the region.”
