Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Reports indicate Toulouse gunman was French intelligence asset

Alex Lantier | 29.03.2012 08:47 | Terror War | Sheffield

Press reports and comments by top intelligence officials suggest that Mohamed Merah, the alleged gunman who killed seven people including three Jewish schoolchildren in a nine-day shooting spree in Toulouse, was a French intelligence asset.

These revelations raise questions about French intelligence’s failure to stop Merah, and whether this failure was dictated by political considerations. The investigation of Merah was led by the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI), run by Bernard Squarcini—a close associate of incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, previously running far behind Socialist Party (PS) candidate François Hollande in next month’s presidential elections, has benefited from massive media coverage after the attacks and now is catching up to Hollande in polls.

In a March 23 Le Monde interview, Squarcini had confirmed that Merah had traveled extensively in the Middle East, even though his legal earnings were roughly at the minimum wage: “He spent time with his brother in Cairo after having traveled in the Near East: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Israel. … Then he went to Afghanistan via Tajikistan. He took unusual routes and did not appear on our radars, nor those of French, American, or local foreign intelligence services.”

Squarcini apparently aimed to bolster the official explanation for Merah’s ability to escape police: he was an undetectable “self-radicalized lone wolf.” This story is being shattered by revelations that French intelligence agencies were apparently in close contact with Merah, trying to develop him as an informant inside Islamist networks.

Yesterday Les Inrockuptibles noted Italian reports that Merah worked for France’s main foreign intelligence agency, the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE). It cited the paper Il Foglio: “According to intelligence sources that spoke to Il Foglio, the General Directorate of External Security obtained entry into Israel for him in 2010, presenting him as an informant, passing through a border post with Jordan. … His entry into Israel, covered by the French, sought to prove to the jihadist network that he could cross borders with a European passport.”

Contacted by Les Inrockuptibles, the DGSE refused to confirm or deny Il Foglio’s story: “The DGSE does not discuss its sources or its operations, real or imagined.”

In comments yesterday to La Dépêche du Midi, Yves Bonnet—the former chief of the Territorial Surveillance Directorate (DST), now absorbed into the DCRI—also asked whether Merah was a DCRI asset.

Bonnet said, “What is nonetheless surprising is that he was known to the DCRI, not only because he was an Islamist, but because he had a correspondent at the domestic intelligence agency. Having a correspondent, it is unusual. It’s not unexceptional. Call it a correspondent, call it a handler … I don’t know how far his relations or his collaboration with the service went, but one can ask questions.”

Squarcini denied yesterday that Merah was “an informant of the DCRI or of any French or foreign service.” However, his interview in Le Monde suggests that Merah was precisely that.

By Squarcini’s own admission, Merah repeatedly visited DCRI offices after his trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan—in October and November 2011—to discuss what he had seen. Squarcini called this “an administrative interview without coercion, as we were not in a judicial setting.” Thus Merah was freely giving the DCRI information it wanted to know; that is, he acted as an informant, officially or otherwise.

These revelations make officials’ failure to identify and stop Merah all the more inexplicable. They also raise the issue of whether French intelligence officials were behind the highly irregular delays in the investigation of the shootings.

Though the shootings took place on March 11, March 15, and March 19, Merah only fell under suspicion on March 20—after police compared a short list of Toulouse-area Islamists with a list of IP addresses of computers having browsed an Internet ad posted by the March 11 murder victim.

Journalist Didier Hassoux told Les Inrockuptibles that police obtained the list of 576 IP addresses “when the first killing, of a soldier, was reported”—that is, on March 11. However, according to surveillance technology specialist Jean-Marc Manach, the IP addresses were not sent on to Internet service providers (ISPs) for identification until five days later, on March 16. The ISPs responded the next day.

This five-day delay is very unusual, Manach notes: “Police sources told me that such operations [to obtain individual identities from ISPs] take only a few minutes. Another source, among those who usually respond to such judicial requests, said that they take ‘48 hours maximum.’”

In a further blow to the official account of Merah as a “lone wolf,” a video of the killings made by the gunman arrived to Al Jazeera late on Monday, in an envelope postmarked Wednesday, March 21. However, on that day Mohamed Merah was holed up inside his apartment under siege by police, who had also detained his brother, Abdelkader. It is unclear who mailed the video, which had been heavily edited to disguise voices—raising the possibility that Merah had accomplices in the killings.

French officials reacted ferociously to news of the video. Sarkozy called for any television channel obtaining such images not to broadcast them, while Hollande warned that Al Jazeera could lose its right to broadcast in France if it publicized the video.

Hollande’s stance on the Toulouse video reflects the capitulation of the bourgeois “left” parties in France to law-and-order hysteria after these tragic shootings. No one has demanded an investigation of the intelligence agencies’ role in the killings, though they now reek of a state operation. Nor have the French Communist Party, the New Anti-capitalist Party, or the PS pointed out that the Sarkozy administration, which has benefited electorally from the crime, faces legitimate suspicion that it might be involved.

This reflects the degeneration of the entire political establishment. Having backed imperialist wars in Muslim countries and waves of social cuts in France—as social-democratic officials in Greece pushed through even more devastating cuts demanded by the European Union—the “left” parties themselves now rely on chauvinist invocations of anti-Muslim patriotism. This leaves them prostrate before the security services and the Sarkozy administration’s attempt to turn the Toulouse shootings into the basis for what appears to be a political coup.

Alex Lantier
- Homepage: https://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/toul-m28.shtml

Additions

French Socialist Party presidential candidate backs police in Toulouse shootings

29.03.2012 22:19

In a Europe 1 radio interview yesterday, Socialist Party (PS) presidential candidate François Hollande refused to make any political criticism of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the shooting spree allegedly carried out by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse and Montauban.

The killings took place over nine days, between March 11 and 19, and resulted in the deaths of seven people, including three Jewish schoolchildren.

Hollande was forced to raise token criticisms of various aspects of the police investigations, as high-ranking intelligence officials have raised serious questions and made statements alleging that Merah was a French intelligence asset.

Highly irregular breakdowns in security, reminiscent of 9/11, were allowed by Sarkozy’s trusted appointees in the security and police organizations. Despite Merah’s frequent dealings with the police, he was allowed to continue his alleged rampage, apparently undetected, for 9 days. (See, “Reports indicate Toulouse gunman was French intelligence asset” above). These questions include:

* Why did it take so long to identify and catch the killer?

* Why did police kill Merah in the assault on his flat last Thursday?

* What is the significance of Merah’s long relationship with police intelligence chief Bernard Squarcini?

Hollande admitted that it would have been better to catch Merah alive and obtain information from him.

However, when interviewer Jean-Pierre Elkabbach asked Hollande about his public homage to the police unit that killed Merah, Hollande said he would do the same again: “The police did their job. I salute their work ... the police did their job remarkably.”

When Elkabbach asked if Hollande wanted to comment on the political leadership that had overseen police operations, Hollande responded indignantly: “Do you really think that I’m going to get into that debate today, while the investigations are being made, about the judgment I will make of [Interior Minister Claude] Guéant? … My responsibility is to ensure that France is protected.”

Guéant closely supervised operations, in close contact with Sarkozy, and was therefore directly responsible for the decision to storm Merah’s flat and kill him. Experts have suggested that this was unnecessary and that he could have been captured alive.

Hollande persisted in covering up for Sarkozy and his police henchmen. Asked if he thought that police made errors in their conduct of the case, he said that he would “demand full light be shed … after the elections.” He added, “I’m in no hurry.”

Elkabbach reminded Hollande that he had previously pledged to remove Sarkozy’s appointed police bosses, asking if, on taking power, he would remove the director general of the National Police, Frédéric Péchenard. He replied: “There’s no reason to replace him straight away.”

Of Bernard Squarcini, who faces accusations of illegally monitoring phone records of journalists investigating illicit financing of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign, he said: “We will look into the functioning of his service.”

Without criticising the vast increase in police powers to spy on the population and criminalise opposition he asserted: “I do not wish to judge those who carried out the operation. ...What counts is to be able to make our surveillance and intelligence services more effective still.”

With his sycophantic praise of Sarkozy’s cops and spies, Hollande is giving a green light to Sarkozy to exploit the killings to hijack the political agenda in the run-up to the elections, which are to be carried out amid an atmosphere of law-and-order hysteria benefiting Sarkozy. Hollande’s decision not to challenge what is effectively a political coup by Sarkozy is all the more remarkable, as the fallout from the Toulouse shootings is undermining Hollande’s position in the elections.

Already this is reflected in the opinion polls: the second round voting intentions in December were 60 percent for Hollande and 40 percent for Sarkozy. Yesterday Le Monde reported that this lead had fallen to 53.5 percent for Hollande to 46.5 percent for Sarkozy, though the paper oddly claimed that the shootings had no impact on the election. A poll yesterday put Sarkozy ahead in the first round with 28 percent, with Hollande trailing at 26.5 percent.

Rather than attempting to challenge Sarkozy’s law-and-order offensive, Hollande tried to emphasize the extent to which the PS has also given extensive powers to police. He reminded his listeners that a law passed in 2001, under the PS-led Plural Left government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, giving the state the right to spy on Internet users, was reportedly a key tool in locating Merah.

Hollande and the “left” of the French political establishment are deeply complicit in the anti-democratic law-and-order policies championed by Sarkozy, as well as his anti-worker social cuts. Sarkozy and the PS both rely on law-and-order rhetoric and the repressive powers of the police to suppress popular opposition to an unpopular political agenda of social cuts and war shared by both the social democratic “left” and the conservative right in Europe. This underlies Hollande’s cowardly capitulation to Sarkozy and his henchmen.

Antoine Lerougetel
- Homepage: https://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/toul-m29.shtml


Comments

Display the following comment

  1. State Terror — guardian
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech