French interior minister Claude Guéant yesterday revealed that Merah had been on the radar of the DCRI — France’s domestic intelligence agency — “for years”.
It has since transpired that Merah was questioned by the intelligence service as recently as November 2011, after being summoned to explain trips he had made to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Astonishingly, Merah was reportedly granted freedom to leave by his French intelligence questioners after providing them with photographs supporting his claims of having merely been on an innocent tourist holiday.
Today saw further revelations come to light about the French authorities’ knowledge of Merah’s violent tendencies. A report in French newspaper Le Télégramme details how the mother of a 15-year-old-boy claims she twice filed complaints with the police, after Merah showed her son violent Jihadist videos and extremist literature at his Toulouse apartment. The woman, identified by the pseudonym Aisha, said that:
‘I am appalled. It took all these people [to be] killed for Mohammed Merah [to be] finally stopped,’ she said. ‘The police knew all about the danger of this individual and his radicalism’.
The French authorities’ excuses for their inability to prevent Merah’s killings are highly questionable. As Merah very much fits the profile of a classic intelligence asset — young, disaffected, and with a history of petty criminality — serious questions should be asked about whether he really just “slipped through the net”, or if in reality the intelligence services deliberately failed to prevent the attack, or even actively provocateured it.
In this regard it is interesting to note that Nikolas Sarkozy, previously trailing in the polls in a French election year, is now the favorite to win the first round of the presidential election next month. Sarkozy has promised a shocked French nation that he will crack down on Islamic extremism should he be re-elected, as well as stating that he will introduce stricter monitoring of the Internet, and make it a crime to visit unspecified “hate” websites.
This article first appeared at Resistance Radio.
Brit Dee runs an independent online radio station called Resistance Radio, which broadcasts daily news, views and analysis challenging the lies of our corrupt political and financial leaders, and the controlled corporate media, at http://www.resistradio.com.
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