Toulouse Shooting: Police Hunt Dismissed Neo-Nazi Soldiers After Horrific Murders

[Danny Jarman]

More details from [URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/21/mohammed-merah-profile"]The Guardian...
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As the Toulouse siege unfolded on Wednesday, a fuller picture was emerging of the young man behind one of France's worst killing sprees.

Some of the details remain contradictory, but it appears that Mohamed Merah, who shot a rabbi and three Jewish children dead at point-blank range, has a history of petty crime. An alleged former jihadi fighter, he was rejected by the French military two years ago.


On Wednesday morning he had been planning to kill again, he told negotiators, targeting a soldier he had already identified.


Most extraordinary was an almost certainly false claim that emerged during the armed siege of Merah's apartment block: that in 2008 he escaped in a mass jailbreak in Kandahar, where he had been arrested for bombmaking the previous year. The claim was denied by Afghan security sources. Merah does appear to have spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but later than 2007.


Growing up in a poor neighbourhood in north Toulouse, on the surface Merah seemed typical of many whose families had immigrated a generation or two before from north Africa to France. He was keen on football and enthusiastic about scooters.


Eric Lambert, 46, whose son was an upstairs neighbour in his apartment block, described Merah as friendly and "extremely normal", and said he had helped about 10 months ago to carry a heavy sofa upstairs.


A group of four young men claiming to be friends of Merah, who arrived at a police roadblock close to the besieged building on Wednesday to persuade him to surrender, denied knowledge of his extremist views, despite the revelation that Merah had been under surveillance since returning from Afghanistan. They told a Reuters reporter that their friend never talked to them about religion, and they had no idea he had been to Afghanistan.

One, who gave his name as Kamal and said he was a financial adviser at La Banque Postale, said he had known Merah at school and they had been to football training together after meeting again two years ago.


"He is someone who is very discreet. He is not someone who would brag and go around and say: 'Oh look at my new girlfriend, look how great I am.' He is very polite and always well-behaved," Kamal said. "He never spoke about Islam, but he did pray. But we all pray five times a day … When you know a person well you just can't believe they could have done something like this."


Another friend, a man of Moroccan origin who gave the pseudonym Danny Dem, confirmed reports that Merah tried to enlist in the French army but was rejected. He said he had seen Merah in a nightclub in the city centre last week.


It appears there was another side to Merah unknown to his acquaintances. Like his brother, who was arrested during the manhunt, Merah has a criminal record including a violent crime, and is said to be an adherent of Salafism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. Police found weapons and explosives in his brother's car.
According to Christian Etelin, a lawyer who represented Merah in a court case for driving without a licence in February, Merah's mother and his elder sister, to whom he was close somewhat despaired of him. France's interior minister, Claude Guéant, put it more strongly, describing how Merah's mother had declined to help police by speaking to her besieged son.


"His mother said she did not wish to speak to him because she did not believe she could convince him and he would be deaf to her appeals," he said.
Guéant said Merah had "explained a lot about his agenda" to police negotiators. "His radicalisation took place in a Salafist ideological group and seems to have been firmed up by two journeys he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan."


Etelin told French television that Merah knew he had been under surveillance by the French secret service since returning from Afghanistan, but was "extremely discreet about his political views". He described Merah as "by no means rigid or fanatical", and said he could never imagine him committing crimes of such "hardness and extremity … If you could say anything, it was that he was polite and courteous … quite sweet actually".


But Etelin described a darker side to Merah, who he said was imprisoned at 18 for snatching a bag in the entrance hall of a bank. "Unlike a lot of others who grew up alongside him in that area in the north of the city, he was not involved in drugs. His thing was petty theft," he said.


It appears that Merah, like more than 1,000 other young French citizens, found himself drawn to the jihadist cause in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By his own account, in reported conversations with French police negotiators and a France 24 journalist whom he reportedly called during the siege, it was on these visits that he joined al-Qaida, and he wanted to take revenge for the deaths of Palestinian children and for French military intervention overseas.


"Merah explained he was against the headscarf ban and was fighting against the French participation [in] Nato operations in Afghanistan," said Ebba Kalondo, editor-in-chief of France 24. Merah was calm, talked articulately and said all the murders had been filmed and the videos would be posted online, Kalondo said.


Another man, who said he was 24 and a warehouse worker but did not give his name, said he knew the family, in particular the suspect's brother. He said: "I came down here because I wanted to see what was going on. I heard someone at work listening to the news this morning say: 'It's an Arab, It's an Arab' … He was the kind of kid who got into trouble, but he was a banal young guy. Over the past two years he had changed a lot. He wasn't into having fun, he became harder. He didn't really go to the mosque, he seemed more likely to meet people in obscure flats."

Many contradictions and interesting points. I'm fairly sure someone who pray's 5 times a day wouldn't be seen in a nightclub.

But further down the page we're told he "didn't really go to the mosque"? Even the least pious of muslims go to the mosque on fridays, and yet we're told he went to afghanistan, prayed alot, was radicalised, yet didn't go to the mosque?

I don't know...