By Paul Cruickshank
It was shooting spree that terrorized France for 10 days, and for weeks dominated the country's presidential election campaign.
Starting on March 11, Mohammed Merah, a 23 year old French-Algerian
motor-bike riding assassin, who kept the visor on his helmet shut as he
killed, and filmed every detail in high definition from a camera on his
torso, shot four French paratroopers in two attacks, killing three and
paralyzing one, and then on March 19 shot at point blank range three
children and their teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse, in an attack
that shocked the world.
In an unprecedented manhunt, police tracked the killer to his
apartment in Toulouse, where he held out during a two-day siege.During a
seven-hour rambling confession to negotiators, he claimed to be acting
on behalf of al Qaeda. He was killed in a blaze of gunfire as security
services stormed the building on March 22.
Hours later Jund al Khilafah, known as
JaK, an obscure Kazakh Jihadist group with ties to al Qaeda whose
leaders are thought to be based in the tribal areas of Pakistan, claimed
responsibility for the attacks.
"We claim our responsibility for these blessed operations," the group
claimed, referring to the shooter as Yusuf al Firansi (the French) in
an Arabic communiqué translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Counterterrorism officials initially treated the claim skeptically
because the group had no track record of international terrorist
operations.
But a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told CNN that Merah is
now believed to have linked up with the Kazakh group just months before
the attacks .
The U.S. official said there was "strong intelligence" that Merah
spent time with the group in the tribal areas of Pakistan during a trip
he made there between August and October 2011. "We're talking about a
short time, perhaps even only an afternoon," said the official, who
added that this did not necessarily mean the Kazakh group directed Merah
to launch the shootings in France.
In the weeks after Merah's death there was much debate over whether
he was an example of a "lone-wolf terrorist," plotting and acting alone,
or had been recruited into the al Qaeda terrorist network, as he
claimed to negotiators during the siege.
The reality, according to the senior U.S. official and a new book
"The Merah Affair: the Investigation" set to be published in France next
week, appears to be somewhere in-between.
French journalists Éric Pelletier and Jean-Marie Pontaut, who
provided an advance copy of their book to CNN, reveal that Merah told
negotiators during the siege that his handlers in Pakistan tasked him
with assassinating an Indian diplomat in Paris. Merah claimed that on
his return to France he rejected this mission, and instead decided to
assassinate French soldiers to retaliate against the French military
presence in Afghanistan. He claimed that on March 19 he only decided to
attack the Jewish school in Toulouse after he discovered that the
soldier he was targeting that day was not at home.
No evidence has emerged that Merah was in touch with jihadists in
Pakistan after he returned to France in October 2011. He appears to have
planned the attacks himself. French authorities have so far alleged the
only other co-conspirator was his older brother, Abdelkader Merah, a
radical fundamentalist long on their radar screen, who they arrested
after Merah's death and charged with assisting in the plot. Abdelkader
denies the charges, but according to the authors told French
investigators he was proud of the way his brother died as a fighter.
The book outlines several reasons why French authorities began to
take the claim by JaK, the Kazakh group, seriously. One was that
Abdelkader Merah told investigators his brother liked to be called Yusuf
- the name JaK called him – by close family members, and this was only
known inside the family. Another was they established that Merah had
opened an Internet account under that name.
Furthermore, in a second statement of responsibility on March 31 a
JaK operative revealed several pieces of information about Merah not
then in the public domain, such as a trip he made to the Kurdish areas
of northern Iraq, which were subsequently verified by French
authorities, according to the book.
"The French think the claim is genuine: They don't have any doubt anymore," Pelletier said.
When Merah spent two weeks in the Miranshah area in North Waziristan
in September 2011, a "major Western intelligence agency" had Merah on
their radar screen, according to the authors. Electronic eavesdropping
detected the opening of two Internet addresses in Miranshah that
September, according to the authors, but Pelletier said it remained
unclear at what point the agency established the account belonged to
Merah.
It was only after the killings that French domestic security services
were told that Merah spent time in North Waziristan during this period,
according to the authors, raising the possibility that crucial
intelligence that might have prevented the attack was not shared in
time. When Merah returned to France from Pakistan in the fall of 2011,
he was interrogated by domestic security agents who wanted to know the
reason for his travel, but after he claimed his Pakistan trip was for
tourism, he was judged as no immediate threat. Pelletier said it was not
clear when France's foreign intelligence service was informed about his
travel to North Waziristan.
After the killings, the Western intelligence agency informed French
domestic security services that a number used by Merah in North
Waziristan had also been used to contact terrorists belonging to Harakat
al Mujahideen, a Kashmiri group with close links to al Qaeda, according
to the authors, raising the possibility Merah was in touch with the
group.
One of Harakat al Mujahideen's top commanders was Ilyas Kashmiri, a
veteran Pakistani jihadist who in the two years before his reported
death in a drone strike in June 2011 simultaneously played a lead role
in orchestrating al Qaeda plots against the West, including a
"Mumbai-Style" plot against Europe that led to an unprecedented U.S.
State Department travel advisory for the Continent in October 2010,
according to intelligence officials.
Pelletier said that this possible link to Harakat al Mujahideen may
explain orders Merah apparently received to assassinate an Indian
diplomat in Paris.
After the killings, French domestic security services learned that
Merah received two days of "ultra-rapid" training in North Waziristan,
according to the authors, after being vetted because of concerns he
might be a spy.
JaK claimed it provided Merah with this instruction, after he reached their encampments.
"In Islamabad he came to know some people who took him to the Taliban
and who, on their part, facilitated his arrival to the tribal areas,
where he eventually ended up joining our brigade," one of the group's
operatives calling himself Abu al-Qa'qa' al-Andalusi claimed in the
March 31 statement in Arabic translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Pelletier and Pontier wrote that subsequent investigations had confirmed
Merah's passage through Pakistan's capital.
The JaK operative in the same statement described the nature of the
training Merah received. "He did not desire to train in explosives, even
though that was available to him within a very narrow circle of no more
than three individuals. He preferred fighting with weapons, as he told
me ... assassinations were more appropriate for him." The operative
claimed the two of them conversed in French.
Al-Andalusi wrote that Merah nevertheless agreed to launch a suicide
bombing attack in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region but "one day
after the program was changed for reasons that cannot be explained,
Yusuf started his return to France, promising to accomplish what he is
capable."
"Martyrdom was his goal and the hope that was always on his mind," he said.
JaK is believed responsible for several attacks against security
forces in Kazakhstan, including the country's first suicide bombing and
gun and grenade attacks, since its founding in September 2011, and has
increasingly embraced al Qaeda's ideology of global jihad, Jacob Zenn, a
Jamestown Foundation analyst who has researched the group said earlier
this year.
Zenn said it is possible that a crackdown by security services in
Kazakhstan has driven more of its members to the relative safe haven of
the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, where he said a few dozen of the
group's members may have integrated with other jihadists.
Eyewitness accounts by European militants who traveled to the tribal
areas of Pakistan suggest that lines have blurred between al Qaeda and
other jihadist groups operating in the area.
Path to jihad
"The Merah Affair" sheds significant new light on Merah's
radicalization, by drawing on interviews with family members, close
associates and files kept on him by French security services.
The book paints a picture of a troubled truant from a broken home,
who was impossible for his mother to control. For a time he was
transferred to the care of social services. He spent hours playing
"shoot-em-up" video games, and his adolescence increasingly turned to
petty crime.
His father returned to Algeria when he was very young and his key
influence became his older brother Abdelkader, a domineering Salafist
fundamentalist who also had a history of petty crime, according to the
authors.
After being imprisoned in January 2008 for a knife assault, Merah was
born again into Islam through contact with other Muslim prisoners,
according to fellow inmates. One of them claimed Abdelkader Merah played
a central role in his radicalization in prison by supplying him with
recordings of jihadist chanting, which Abdelkader Merah's lawyer denies,
according to the authors. The book reveals that Merah found prison life
difficult and once attempted suicide.
Abdelghani Merah, one of Merah's older brothers, told investigators
that his brother had become radicalized by the time he was released from
prison in September 2009, and began to express his rage over the
presence of French troops in Afghanistan, the book reveals. His mother
told investigators that for a period he hung out with radicals in the
Toulouse area.
Mohammed and Abdelkader Merah had first came on the radar screen of
French counterterrorism officials in the mid-2000s because both were
loosely connected to a group of extremists in the Toulouse area that was
recruiting militants to fight in Iraq, according to the authors. In
2011, Abdelkader Merah even arranged a short-lived marriage between his
mother and the father of Sabri Essid, one of the convicted facilitators,
who was sentenced to a short time in prison in France after being
detained in Syria in 2006.
Abdelghani Merah, the other brother, who had become estranged from
Abdelkader Merah after the latter sharply disapproved of his marriage to
a Jewish woman, told investigators that Mohammed Merah was a
subservient side-kick to Abdelkader Merah when they were growing up,
according to the authors. "Abdelkader rottened the life of Mohammed,"
Abddelghani Merah said. "It was him, I'm certain that gave the idea to
Mohammed."
Mohammed Merah's radical activity was escalating. In June 2010 Merah
forced a 15-year-old boy to watch violent jihadist propaganda, including
the execution of American hostages, according to a complaint made to
the police at the time by the youth's mother, according to the book.
After he learned she had filed a police report, he threatened her and
punched her son, according to her account. She told a French newspaper
that he told her he was a Muhajid and would die a martyr.
During the siege, Merah claimed he had been trying to participate in
jihad for several years. In early summer 2010, he tried to enlist in the
French Foreign Legion, but was rejected. According to Pelletier and
Pontier, he told negotiators his plan had been to turn his guns on his
fellow soldiers once in Afghanistan, and join the Taliban insurgency.
Between July and October 2010 he traveled to several Middle Eastern
countries, including Syria, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Israel
and Egypt, where Abdelkader Merah was spending some time pursuing
religious studies. His brother later told investigators that Merah
confided details of his trip to him during his stay. He envisaged at
that time fighting jihad in Somalia or Sudan, according to the authors.
"I now realize that he was searching a for a way to get the contacts
he needed to join al Qaeda and meet an emir who could decide what he
should do. To commit the acts which he did, you have to get the sanction
of a sheikh or emir," Abdelkader Merah later told investigators,
according to the authors.
After briefly returning to Toulouse, Merah set off for Afghanistan
via Tajikistan. His plan, he later said during the siege, was to get
himself kidnapped by the Taliban and then persuade them he shared their
views so he could join their ranks, the book revealed. The plan failed:
Merah was apprehended in Kandahar in November 2010 by Afghan police
before he could connect with militants, and briefly transferred to
American custody. But Merah had entered Afghanistan lawfully and there
were no grounds to detain him, so he was allowed to return to France.
Increasingly on the radar screen
It was only when he was back in France in January 2011 that he
answered the police summons in relation to the altercation with the
French youth the previous summer. He told police he was not an
extremist, and the complaint was false, according to the authors. After
the plaintiffs indicated they did not want to see him do prison time,
police told him he was free to go.
But his trip to Afghanistan had placed him more firmly on the radar
of French domestic security services. They wiretapped his phones, but
after finding no incriminating evidence, ceased listening to his phone
conversations in April 2011 as they were legally required to do,
according to the authors.
The security services continued their human surveillance of him,
logging 1,200 hours by August 2011 and installing a surveillance camera
in front of his apartment building, according the authors. But Merah
showed no signs of radicalism, nor did he have any contact with
extremists in the Toulouse area.
His life did not seem out of the ordinary. To support himself he was
working as a mechanic in various vehicle repair shops as well as
receiving French welfare payments, according to the authors.
He managed to slip away to Pakistan in August without French security services noticing.
When security services learned that month that he had disappeared,
French domestic security officials contacted his mother, who told them
he had left for Pakistan in search of a wife, according to the book. The
security services told her to tell him they wanted to see him on his
return to France.
Merah soon called them back from Pakistan, promising he would get in
touch with them as soon as he returned to France. He was true to his
word. After a brief spell in hospital because he had contracted
hepatitis A during his travels, he met with them and allayed their
concerns, according to the book.
In the months that followed he did not seem like a man on a mission.
In December 2011 he married a 17-year-old French Muslim who wore the
full veil, but they quickly divorced, according to one of his fellow
mechanics, because she did not take care of the housework, the book
revealed.
Several months later, Merah carried out the shootings. According to
the authors, he tracked down the first paratrooper he shot by searching
for the terms "soldier" and "motorbike" online on his mother's computer,
which took him to an online ad posted by a French paratrooper selling
his motorbike. After the two arranged to meet, he shot the paratrooper,
making sure he was dead with a final shot at point blank range.
In a brilliant piece of lateral thinking, it was by exhaustively
cataloging who in France had searched these Internet search terms that
French police were led to Merah, according to Pelletier and Pontier.
CCTV footage at the scene of the second paratrooper shooting had also
revealed which type of motorbike the assassin was driving, and the
police became almost certain Merah was responsible when investigations
established Merah was driving this type of model, the book revealed.
After his death, police found a thumb drive in Merah's trouser pocket
with a file named "Al Qaeda Attacks France" which contained video of
his shootings set to jihadist music. He had already sent a copy to al
Jazeera offices in Paris. The network decided not to air it.
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