Toulouse massacre: Mohammed Merah’s father threatens to sue French police

Algerian authorities have reportedly not yet agreed to a family request that
Merah be buried in the north African country.

Algerian lawyer Zahia Mokhtari told AFP Wednesday she had been hired by the
dead man’s father, Mohammed Benalal Merah, to press charges against French
police for shooting him dead.

“Mr Merah thinks that his son was murdered. He has asked us to file a
complaint against the French security services,” she said. “We will begin
the procedure once the burial is completed.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said Merah was a “fanatic and a monster”
who killed three soldiers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a trainee rabbi
in attacks in and around Toulouse.

Merah’s father insisted Wednesday he would not “shut up” after saying he
wanted to sue over the death of his son.

The comment, reported in an Algerian Arab-language daily newspaper, came after
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe reacted angrily to the threat of a legal
challenge.

“If I were the father of such a monster, I would shut my mouth in shame,”
Juppe said.

In an interview to France 24 later Wednesday, Merah’s father said: “If my son
was really behind the killings, it was not good.

“If he has really committed these crimes and killed innocent people, he was
wrong,” he said, insisting: “If it was really him.

“If he was pushed to commit these acts by other people, it was wrong. He was
blinded”, by them, the father said.

When police surrounded Merah’s Toulouse apartment last week, the gunman fought
off an initial assault and then, in a conversation with a police negotiator,
claimed responsibility for the attacks.

He said he shot dead three soldiers in two separate attacks in Toulouse and
nearby Montauban on March 11 and 15, then last Monday opened fire at a
Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a 30-year-old teacher, his sons aged five
and four, and a seven-year-old girl.

The killer’s father told AFP he had noticed a change in his son’s behaviour
the last time he returned to see his family in Algeria.

“He didn’t appear to want to go out and stayed in his room to recite the Koran
and read books. As soon as he’d hear the muezzin (calling for prayer), he
would run to the mosque,” he said.

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