While French officials were quick to suggest the slaughter of three Jewish children, a trainee rabbi and three soldiers in separate gun attacks by Islamist Mohamed Merah, 23, was the work of a loner with no assistance by terrorist networks, his 29-year-old brother Abdelkader, a Salafist Muslim known for his radical religions convictions and who was present at his final attack, now faces charges in the slayings.
Merah was killed Thursday in a hail of bullets as he tried to shoot his way out of a Toulouse apartment following a 32-hour siege.
Traces of what could be an explosive material were found in Abdelkader’s car.
Police said they were investigating whether the elder brother had provided financial or logistical support to the shooter – something Abdelkader denied.
Merah’s mother is married to the father of Sabri Essad, captured in Syria in 2006. Essad and another Frenchman were running an al-Qaida safehouse in Syria for fighters going to Iraq. Essad was sentenced in 2009 to five years imprisonment in France.” Mera signed his “last tweet ‘Mohamed Merah-Forsane Alizza.’ Forsane Alizza, or ‘Knights of Glory,’ is a France-based jihadist media organization that was banned.
On Wednesday, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said it appeared Abdelkader may have been involved in a network that took jihadists to Iraq in 2007.
Mohamed Merah professed loyalty to al-Qaida, which is an ally of the Salafist Islamist movement.
From the ages of 6 to 13, Mohamed Merah had lived with a foster family. While in prison in 2008, he attempted suicide and also spent his days reading the Koran.
French police, who spoke with Merah before his death, said he intended to kill another military man, but got there too late. He improvised and instead attacked the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and protest the French army’s presence in Afghanistan.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the shootings in Toulouse were “the crimes of a monster and fanatic.”
Merah traveled to Afghanistan alone in 2010, say French authorities, citing French intelligence, and was picked up during a routine road-police check and returned home to France.
Details of the incident remain unclear. U.S. intelligence officials say there are some indications he was picked up by Afghan police and may have briefly been in U.S. custody before being turned over to the French, who flew him home. The U.S. military, however, says it has no record that he had been in U.S. custody.
The incident landed him on a French watch list of suspected Islamic militants, and a U.S. no-fly list. But according to U.S. officials, he was not believed to be connected to any terror groups, and appeared to be a possible aspiring jihadist.
In November 2011, when Merah returned from a second trip to the region, this time to Pakistan, French anti-terrorism investigators questioned him. French authorities deemed the visit to be “tourism.” He was never placed under surveillance.
Police investigators minimized Merah’s claims to have joined al-Qaida.
Merah told police he lived off a government allowance but claimed he had amassed money through robberies to buy weapons.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant told Le Figaro that Merah was a “terrorist acting alone.”
The head of France’s DCRI domestic intelligence agency, Bernard Squarcini, said there was little more that security services could have done to prevent Merah’s atrocities.
While holed up, Merah told police that he traveled to Pakistan in 2011, but had been trained by a single individual, not at a training center.
