Four years ago, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent named Mohamed Merah carried out three terror attacks over the course of a nine-day period, killing three French soldiers as well as four civilians, three of them children, at a Jewish day school. He was subsequently shot and killed by French police following a 30-hour siege. Reviewing a new French book that tells Merah’s story, John Rosenthal notes his “mind-boggling” success in avoiding French authorities, who had him on their radar well before the attacks:
Merah, like many of his acolytes, was the object of an “S” file identifying him as a threat to national security. He had long been under surveillance and he was repeatedly called in for questioning by both the police and the DCRI, the French domestic intelligence agency (since re-baptized as the DGSI). Indeed, in the end, his contact with the DCRI was so regular that the question can be raised as to whether French intelligence was not in fact attempting to use Merah as a willing or unwilling informant. . . .
The story of Mohamed Merah is, in effect, that of a train wreck waiting to happen or, to paraphrase his brother Abdelghani, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode—while French intelligence looked on.
Indeed, in conversation with negotiators during the siege of his apartment, Merah himself expressed amazement at the fact that he was able to carry out his attacks unhindered, attributing his success—and the failure of French authorities—to the will of Allah. . ..
[T]he blindness and downright confusion of French authorities is already evident during the eighteen months Merah spent in prison between December 2007 and October 2009 (which included a brief period of work release). Like so many of the current generation of French jihadists, Merah’s path to jihad passed through an extended phase of delinquency and petty crime. . . .
A cellmate [of Merah’s from one of his incarcerations] reports that “from morning to night” Merah would “blast” a CD featuring Islamic chants and “sounds of explosions.” Nonetheless, prison officials did not note any particular signs of radicalization. More astonishingly still, they appear to have been unaware that Merah was in fact already the subject of an “S” file flagging him as a threat.
Read more on World Affairs Journal: http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/merah-%E2%80%98untold-story%E2%80%99-french-jihadist-icon