‘French gunman, a govt. informant’

The 23-year old French was killed after a 32-hour standoff following three multi-ethnic and multi-confessional shootings.

Italian newspaper Il Foglio said Merah’s trip to Israel and Afghanistan in 2010 was made with the knowledge of the French foreign secret service, which rejects the report.

Also, head of France’s domestic intelligence service DCRI, Bernard Squarcini was quoted by Le Monde as saying that Merah asked for a local DCRI agent by name during the standoff, the same agent who questioned Merah after returning from his 2010 trip.

Merah told the agent “Anyway, I was going to call you to say I had some tip-offs for you, but actually I was going to [kill] you,” Squarcini told the paper but rejected speculation that Merah worked as a French government informant.

Many now believe that Merah could have had a friendly relationship with the agent, which could explain why police did not initially suspect Merah.

However, a former head of a French intelligence service Yves Bonnet said it was “striking” that Merah appeared to have a DCRI “handler” adding, “Having a handler, that is not an innocent thing. I don’t know how far his relationship, or collaboration, with the service went but it is a question worth raising” the Toulouse newspaper La Depeche du Midi quoted Bonnet as saying.

Mohamed was suspected of killing a rabbi and his 3 and 6-year-old sons in a shooting spree at a Jewish school in Toulouse. The school principal’s 10-year-old daughter was also killed in the incident that left a fifth person injured.

The French police have linked the attack to two other shootings days before Mohamed’s death, in which three soldiers of North African or Caribbean descent were killed.

RM/VG/AZ

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes