Last week French interior minister Manuel Valls presented the findings of a damning official police internal investigation into the handling of the case of Toulouse gunman Mohammed Merah, a self-confessed jihadist who shot seven dead in a ten-day rampage in south-west France in March, and in which France’s intelligence services have been accused of deliberately hiding their role.
The 17-page report, by the French police’s internal investigation and disciplinary department, the Inspection générale de la police nationale, the IGPN, was scathing of the actions of France’s domestic intelligence agency, the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur, the DCRI, which had been monitoring Merah for several years before the shootings.
Controversy and mystery continues to surround the DCRI’s responsibility for failing to arrest Merah before he began the killing spree, which claimed the lives of four adults and three children. Merah, 23, began by shooting dead three French paratroopers of North African origin, before attacking a Jewish school in Toulouse where he murdered a Rabbi and three pupils aged 3, 6 and 7. He died in a shootout with police after a two-day siege of his apartment in Toulouse.
The relatives of several of his victims have denounced a cover-up by the DCRI and the former French government of Nicolas Sarkozy, alleging Merah was used as a double-agent by the French intelligence services and that the authorities have deliberately misled public opinion describing him as a “solitary” terrorist.
Commissioned in June, Valls said the IGPN report, published on October 23rd, was an effort “to re-open [the process of] democratic, and thus parliamentary, control of intelligence activities”. Indeed, the enquiry represented a very rare outside scrutiny of the workings of France’s highly-secretive intelligence services.
The IGPN report carefully avoided identifying the potential responsibilities of those in office at the time of the Merah shootings, although many key figures in the affair have been replaced since the change of government. Bernard Squarcini, then head of the DCRI, was ousted following the socialist victory in the presidential election last May. Mediapart has learnt that the DCRI’s regional director in Toulouse has, more recently, also been replaced.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Claude Guéant, interior minister at the time, travelled to Toulouse to be close to the police siege of Merah’s apartment, an unprecedented move in France where senior ministers normally oversee events from Paris. On March 23rd, the day after the siege ended, and as criticism of the special forces' intervention and dysfunctions at the DCRI began to emerge, he told French daily Le Figaro that "neither [Merah] nor those he associated with had ever given the slightest indication of being dangerous".
The IGPN report said the failures it identified did not come from "any defined human error" but from "omissions" and "errors of appreciation". It also cited "problems of leadership and organisation of departments" and what it called "compartmentalisation" between the various police departments concerned – domestic intelligence, criminal investigation and public safety.
Overall, the IGPN report (see below) reveals a series of blunders and an astonishing degree of amateurism.
Firstly, it confirms that Merah had in fact been "the object of the intelligence services' attention" with his own "S" file – this being a category of file the DCRI uses for suspects deemed to be high-risk - from 2006 onwards, contrary to what Bernard Squarcini himself has said. In an interview with French daily Le Monde in March 2012, he claimed that the DCRI had first come across Mohamed Merah in November 2010 after US forces arrested him in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The report also identifies an initial failure in what it calls the "inopportune" deactivation of this file between March 2010 and January 2011. The two IGPN police inspectors who wrote the report note that this was particularly surprising, as "Mohamed Merah’s contact details had been discovered [in 2009] in the list of contacts belonging to one of the members of a Toulouse-based group that sent jihadists to Iraq".
They continue: "It was not until after information relating to the identification of Mohamed Merah in Afghanistan was obtained [on November 22nd 2010] that the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur sent a request to its Toulouse office in January 2011 for an in-depth inquiry." It also criticised the length of time it took the DCRI to react to this, then the slowness of the Toulouse office in following it up.
After that, Merah was the object of surveillance, both of his telephone conversations and his movements, for several months. The report notes that from mid-2011, this surveillance "reveals Merah’s Islamist profile, his extremely suspicious behaviour and his potential for radicalisation." Then followed a series of failures, according to the IGPN report.
The DCRI dropped priority surveillance of Merah
An interview with Merah when he returned to France from Pakistan on November 14th 2011 was not properly prepared and conducted, the report says. In such cases, the officers conducting the interview "should have had prior and complete access to the local administrative investigation and an in-depth dialogue with their colleague in that country’s intelligence service," it comments.
The written account of this interview was only submitted more than two months after the discussion with Merah, the report’s authors say, branding this as insufficient. "What is more," they add, "the written report should unfailingly lead to a clearly defined decision, either to close the file, or to undertake administrative action, or to take it to a judicial level, or even to make an attempt to recruit."
Yet the surveillance stopped after this interview for no apparent reason, they say. "The fact is that as of January 2012, the Merah file no longer seemed to constitute a priority for action for domestic intelligence [the DCRI]." This point is significant for lawyers for the victims' families, who have said they cannot understand why Merah’s surveillance should have lapsed suddenly, just as all the indicators were on red.
However, the report clearly excludes the possibility that Merah may have been recruited by the French intelligence services as an informer, as some have suggested.
It concludes that because there was no further in-depth surveillance from the beginning of 2012, "there was nothing in Merah’s profile and itinerary, given the knowledge obtained by then, to delineate any judicial criteria that could be used to authorise a preventative neutralisation." It does say, however, that the information the authorities had obtained "would have justified a discussion with the public prosecutor’s office."
Besides these key points of procedure, the report also criticises the relative isolation from its peers of the DCRI, created by former president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, merging two domestic intelligence agencies, the DST, and the DCRG. "There is room for major improvements in terms of reciprocal trust and ease of dialogue between domestic intelligence[DCRI]and other police departments or the gendarmerie [1]," it says.
The report gave two examples of this. The DCRI does not have access to complaints filed with the police or gendarmerie, something that would be a valuable source of information "gathered on the ground on a daily basis". And in the case of Merah’s surveillance, it adds, the only way any dialogue could have come about was if there were personal acquaintances between DCRI officers and colleagues in other law enforcement agencies.
In a startling omission, though, the report says nothing about the relationship between domestic and foreign intelligence services. Yet one police trade union, the Syndicat des Cadres de la Sécurité Intérieure, has already commented that "numerous questions remain unanswered on this issue, and to this day the DGSE [Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the foreign intelligence agency] has given no information about the investigations it initiated on Mohamed Merah and his travels abroad."
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1: The French gendarmerie is a national police force attached to the Army. Very broadly, the gendarmerie polices rural and semi-urban areas, while the civilian Police Nationale is covers urban areas.
Police evaluating police 'not an efficient method'
The report is less scathing about the judicial investigation that was opened on March 11th after Merah killed his first victim, a soldier, in Montauban, 50 kilometres north of Toulouse, and about the way the siege of Merah’s apartment on March 20th and 21st was handled by the the police’s special forces unit, the RAID.
It judges the unit’s decision to arrest Merah at his home rather than in the street as "coherent". Without specifying that Merah died during the siege, it effectively congratulates the unit because "in the end, Mohamed Merah was indeed neutralised without having been able to commit other crimes".
"The operation had been undermined from the start by earlier failures in the surveillance of his home," it says. "Despite an extensive system of observation, Mohamed Merah was able to leave his home and return to it without either his departure […] or his return being observed."
Nevertheless, the report does recommend that the RAID should work more closely with the gendarmerie’s special forces unit, the GIGN, notably by undertaking more exercises together and more use made of the unit coordinating special forces, called the Unité de Coordination des Forces d’Intervention, (UCOFI).
This line differs sharply from what Christian Prouteau, the senior gendarme who first created and led the GIGN, said at the time of the siege. He openly criticised the RAID, saying that their action had put Merah "in a psychological state that incited him to continue his 'war'."
In its recommendations, the IGPN report adopts a much more moderate tone than employed for the dysfunctions it identified. Some recommendations are even derisory, such as considering the use of lie detectors to avoid DCRI agents being bamboozled by terrorist apprentices just back from tribal zones in Pakistan.
It calls for the creation of regional liaison offices to promote dialogue between DCRI officers and colleagues in other agencies. It also said the DCRI would benefit from setting up an effective avenue for audit and inspection. And it asks that intelligence officers have access to information such as data from airlines or suspects' bank accounts, which would provide "a preventative means of detection in the financial area".
It also suggests drafting a bill to "incriminate all terrorist acts […] when they are committed by a French national abroad", and to penalise "the administration and animation of jihadist sites". This call has already been heard in part – on October 16th the French Senate adopted a bill that would allow for the prosecution of French nationals who commit terrorist acts outside France or who travel abroad to train in jihadist camps.
Squarcini, speaking to Le Figaro last week, called the report "truncated" and said he had not been interviewed by the IGPN over the Merah affair. The chairman of the parliamentary law commission, Socialist Party MP Jean-Jacques Urvoas, who this summer, Urvoas set up a parliamentary commission to evaluate the intelligence services, praised the report but expressed reservations about its method. "I don't think that asking the police to evaluate its own performance is the most efficient method," he said. "It is a praiseworthy act of transparency, but what will this report change?"
While the report carefully avoids criticising the creation of the domestic intelligence agency in 2008, Urvoas said its investigation "reveals by default the defects implicit in the creation of the DCRI, which seems to be the victim of a work overload, the indecisiveness of [police] services across the country, a lack of coordination between different levels and the absence of a common culture between the former DST and the DCRG."
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English version: Sue Landau
(Editing by Graham Tearse)