Killer leaves trail of questions in France
Questions raised after gunman’s deadly rampage
After a militant gunman is killed in a hail of bullets in Toulouse, French leaders wonder why he went unnoticed for so long.
PARIS – France questioned on Thursday whether its intelligence service had blundered by allowing a young Muslim with a violent criminal record, spotted twice in Afghanistan, to become the first al-qaida-inspired killer to strike on its soil.
France’s security services have long been regarded as among the most effective in Europe, having prevented terror attacks on French soil for the last 15 years.
But Foreign Minister Alain Juppé acknowledged on Thursday there was reason to ask whether security flaws had permitted Mohamed Merah, 23, to carry out three deadly shootings within 10 days before he was identified, located and killed.
Merah killed seven people in France before he died in a hail of bullets Thursday as he scrambled out of a groundfloor window during a gun battle with elite police commandos.
A Frenchman of Algerian origin, he died from a gunshot wound to his head at the end of a 30-hour standoff with police at his apartment in southern France and after confessing to killing three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi.
“A killer wanted, according to his own words, to bring France to its knees by sowing hatred and terror. He has been neutralized,” President Nicolas Sarkozy told a campaign rally in the eastern city of Strasbourg.
Merah fired frantically at police from a Colt .45 pistol as he climbed through his apartment window onto a veranda and toppled to the ground some 1.5 metres below, say prosecutors and police.
Two police commandos were injured in the operation – a dramatic climax to a siege that riveted the world after the killings shook France a month before a presidential election.
Interior Minister Claude Guéant told reporters at the scene that Merah emerged from the bathroom firing repeatedly when police pushed a video probe into the room. “In the end, Mohamed Merah jumped from the window with his gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground.”
Neighbours watched from the sidelines as the drama exploded around a man friends have spoken of as an amateur soccer player who visited nightclubs and was not outwardly religious or involved with radical politics.
Police investigators were working to establish whether Merah had worked alone or with accomplices, prosecutor François Molins said, adding that Merah had filmed his three shooting attacks with a camera hung from his body and had indicated that he had posted clips online.
The most disturbing image of the attacks was of him grabbing a young girl at a Jewish school on Monday by the hair and shooting her in the head.
Opposition leaders, including far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, demanded to know how Merah was able to shoot dead three Jewish children and four adults despite being allegedly under surveillance and having been questioned as recently as November by the DCRI domestic intelligence agency.
“Since the DCRI was following Mohamed Merah for a year, how come they took so long to locate him?” Socialist party security spokesperson François Rebsamen asked on the JDD.FR website.
Merah, a French citizen of Algerian extraction, was also able to amass a cache of at least eight guns under the noses of French intelligence, including several Colt .45 pistols of the kind he used in the shootings, but also at least one Uzi submachine-gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun.
In Washington, two U.S. officials said Merah was on a U.S. government “no fly” list, barring him from boarding any U.s.-bound aircraft. The officials said that his name had been on the list for some time.
He was put on the list because U.S. officials deemed him a potential threat to aviation, one of the officials said.
Rebsamen said that after the shooting of two paratroopers in Montauban, near Toulouse, on March 15, Merah’s name was on top of a DCRI list of 20 persons to be particularly closely watched in the southwestern MidiPyrénées region. Yet the agency appeared to have lost him.
Investigators only tracked down Merah on Tuesday, a day after he had shot dead three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Interior Minister Guéant said Merah was located with certainty when a police helicopter overflew his home and he came to the window.
Police came up with his name when a list of 576 people who viewed an Internet advertisement placed by the shooter’s first victim was compared with the DCRI’S watchlist on Monday and led them to the internet service provider address of Merah’s mother.
He had, however, been known to the DCRI since 2010. Merah first visited Afghanistan that year, was stopped at a road checkpoint by Afghan police in Kandahar province and sent back to France by American forces.
His second visit ended after three months last October when he contracted hepatitis and returned home, according to the public prosecutor in charge of the case.
He was interviewed by DCRI agents in Toulouse in November but told them he had been to Afghanistan on holiday – and even showed them photographs, prosecutor Molins said.
Merah told police negotiators at his besieged home on Wednesday that he trained at an al-qaida camp during the same trip.
Although Merah could not have been arrested without proof of criminal intent, critics say authorities could have taken intermediate steps. French anti-terrorist law allows for the telephones of suspects to be tapped without judicial approval on the authority of the prime minister and an advisory panel.
Lawyer Christian Etelin, who represented Merah in cases including driving without a licence, said he seemed to struggle with a sense of alienation after being twice rejected by the French army. He said an 18-month imprisonment for petty crime convictions hardened his outlook but he had not lived a life one might expect of an Islamic fundamentalist.
“He liked cars, money, girls,” Etelin told reporters. “He did not go to the mosque, was not proselytizing and led an existence which was fully modern in appearance, with friends and plenty of outings. He always gave the outward impression, at least, of someone who wanted to live a modern life.”
RAID commandos had been in a standoff since the early hours of Wednesday with Merah.
He had initially fired through his front door when police swooped on his flat on Wednesday morning but later negotiated, promising to give himself up and saying he did not want to die. By late Wednesday evening, he changed tack again, telling negotiators he wanted to die “like a mujahideen,” weapon in hand, and would not go to prison, Molins said.
“If it’s me (who dies), too bad, I will go to paradise. If it’s you, too bad for you,” Molins quoted Merah as saying.