Even before the long siege involving Toulouse shooting suspect Mohamed Merah reached its bloody climax, questions were being asked about the speed of the police investigation into the murders and the role of France's secret services in monitoring Merah and his activities.
One question concerns the speed of the police investigations following the first of the gunman's killings – the murder of a French soldier in Toulouse on March 11th. Two more soldiers were later shot dead at nearby Montauban on March 15th. Then on Monday March 19th Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, aged 30, his two sons aged three and six and a seven-year-old girl were all shot dead at close range outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish secondary school in Toulouse. Before his death in the siege at his Toulouse flat, Merah is said to have admitted he carried out all the killings.
The first soldier to be killed, Imad Ibn Ziaten, 30, had placed an online advert to sell his motorbike, and Merah is thought to have responded to this advert and lured the soldier into a trap. How long did it take investigators to trace the IP address (1) used by the killer to make contact with the soldier?
According to a senior police officer contacted by Mediapart, investigators had to “check 576 IP addresses before finding the right one”. And Paris prosecutor François Molins, who is involved in the investigation in south-west France because it is a terrorist case, told the media that it was not until Saturday March 17th – six days after the first shooting – that officers obtained those 576 IP addresses.
However, several specialists have said they consider this delay in getting the IP addresses unusually long, as the police are normally able to obtain such details within the space of just a few hours.
Once the investigators obtained the results on Saturday March 17th it took until the afternoon of Monday March 19th – hours after the shooting of the rabbi and three pupils in Toulouse – before a likely suspect was thrown up. Among the IP addresses was one belonging to the mother of two brothers who were already known to the authorities. One was Abdelkader Merah who according to officials “had been linked with” a Jihadist network in Iraq though inquiries into his involvement had gone no further. The other was Mohamed Merah an “ordinary criminal” known for “violent acts and bad behaviour” and who had a “unusual self-radicalised Salafist profile”.
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1: An IP or Internet Protocol address is a number unique to each computer which allows its location to be established when linked to the internet.
What was the intelligence agency doing?
Mohamed Merah had twice been to Afghanistan, in 2010 and 2011, each time “by his own means, not using intermediaries” according to the prosecution authorities. During his first stay he was reportedly arrested at a road checkpoint and handed over to the American army and then sent back to France. According to the authorities he had “no ties with any organisation”.
Once officers had learned of the two brothers' potential connection with the first murder the family's phones were tapped. But Paris prosecutor François Molins said that at that time on the Monday neither of the brothers had been located. And it was not until the following day that Mohamed Merah was formally identified as a suspect. This followed information from a local Yamaha dealer who said that Mohamed Merah – or his brother – had asked him how they could get rid of their scooter's tracker, the anti-theft device that allows a stolen vehicle to be tracked by satellite. The shootings at Montauban and the school in Toulouse had been carried out by a gunman on a scooter.
Another key question that has been raised is the role of the French intelligence agency the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI) in the affair. How much did they know about Merah and his activities, and should he have been identified as a greater risk? "The suspect in this case does not seem to have been closely watched, despite his profile," said a police and intelligence expert contacted by Mediapart. "Is the DCRI simply just one big filing system?"
The foreign minister Alain Juppé publicly discussed the question of whether there had been a security lapse in relation to Merah when he was interviewed while the siege was still continuing. Juppé told Europe 1 radio that Mohamed Merah had “recently been questioned by the intelligence services”.
He said: “I can see why you would ask the question whether there has been a failure or not. As I don't know if there was a failure I cannot tell you what type of failure – but we must get to the bottom of this.” However in a statement issued later Juppé added: “I personally have no reason to think that there has been a failure.”
Nonetheless, according to at least one witnesses the authorities – in the form of the police and the prefecture – were alerted to Merah's behaviour as far back as 2010. This behaviour included violent threats not just against individuals but against “all French people”. A woman who lived near Merah in the Izards district of Toulouse says that she made a formal complaint after Merah had taken her 15-year-old son to his flat, shown him several large swords and made him watch Al Qaeda videos, which included scenes of women being executed with a bullet to the head.
“He [later] came to our place and threatened and hit me,” the woman told La Télegramme. “He said that I was an atheist and that I had to pay, like all French people. He kept repeating that he was a Mujahid [holy warrior] and that he would die a martyr, that he would wipe all those who killed Muslims from the face of the earth.”
The woman told La Télegramme that she had informed the police and prefecture, twice making formal complaints and following them up. “But in vain,” she said. “All those people had to be killed before Mohamed Merah was finally stopped.”
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English version: Michael Streeter