A tale of racism and family violence
“BURNING HATRED against France and against Jews, and an orgy of domestic violence.”
That was how Anne Chenevat, a key witness, described the Merah family — a divorced mother, three sons and two daughters — to the Special Criminal Court in Paris last week.
Mohamed Merah, the family’s youngest son, killed seven people, including three Jewish children shot at point-blank range, and maimed six others in the southern French towns of Montauban and Toulouse between March 11 and March 19, 2012.
He was himself killed by security forces three days later.
The main defendants in the current trial, which started three weeks ago, are his older brother Abdelkader Merah and his older sister Souad. Abdelkader was arrested in 2012; Souad fled to Algeria.
The siblings are accused of inspiring the killing spree.
Anne Chenevat was the partner of Abdelghani Merah, the eldest Merah brother, for six years. According to her, Zuleikha Aziri, the Algerian-born mother, would use electric wire to beat her children.
Violence between the brothers was rampant: on one occasion, Abdelkader inflicted seven stab wounds on Abdelghani. Antisemitism and hatred for all non-Muslim French and were held as self-evident in the family.
Born Catholic, she once admitted to the Merahs that she had a Jewish grandfather. “As a result, I was routinely abused and spat upon by Zuleikha for being ‘a dirty French woman’ and a ‘dirty Jewess’”, Chenevat said.
She left Abdelghani because of his addiction to alcohol and drugs and raised their son Theodore alone.
Also called also as a witness, Abdelghani concurred with his former companion about the Merahs’ ethnic and religious prejudices: “We all grew up hating France and the Jews, it is a fact.”
According to his testimony, Abdelkader — along with Souad — turned to radical Islam in 2006 and frequently visited salafist mosques and madrasas in Egypt, and was the main influence on Mohamed.
Theodore Chenevat, the son of Anne Chenevat and Abdelghani Merah — now a 21-yearold business and economics student — chillingly told the court that in order to indoctrinate him into jihad, his uncle Abdelkader shared videos of “Islamic beheading” with him and attempted to have him visit mortuaries.
When Elie Korchia, the counsel acting for Mohamed Merah’s Jewish victims, asked him whether Abdelkader and Mohamed should be seen as two heads of a single terrorist beast, he answered that the fugitive older sister Souad should be counted as a third and equally dangerous head.
The trial, which is expected to last until early November, continues in Paris.
She used electric wire to beat her children