France defends operation to catch gunman
PARIS (AFP) — France’s interior minister has launched a robust defense of the police as criticism grows of the operation that ended in the dramatic death of a gunman who killed seven people, three of them children.
Already under pressure over accusations that intelligence failures allowed Mohamed Merah to carry out three deadly attacks before being tracked down, police also face questions over the raid that ended in his death on Thursday.
Merah murdered three Jewish children, a trainee rabbi and three soldiers in three separate gun attacks between March 11 and March 19 in the southwestern city of Toulouse, shocking France in the build-up to presidential elections.
On Thursday France’s most-wanted man tried to shoot his way out of his apartment after a 32-hour police siege that ended in his death.
There is fierce speculation about the 23-year-old’s motives and if he had any accomplices. He had claimed to be an al-qaeda member who killed to avenge Palestinian children and punish France for sending troops to Afghanistan.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant yesterday told Le Figaro that Merah was a “terrorist acting alone.”
“It’s the first time that France has been confronted with this particular type of action,” he said, dismissing as “irresponsible” criticism of the police and in particular the operation that ended in his death.
There were hopes the gunman would be taken alive so that he could be put on trial. France is home to western Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities.
But police could not have used tear gas to put Merah to sleep as that was illegal under international conventions, Gueant said.
“The men who carried out this operation are very great professionals...,” he added.
Earlier, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that security officials had known that Merah was a radical Islamist who had visited Afghanistan.
But there was no reason to suspect he was planning attacks, he said.
The intelligence services “did their job perfectly well. They identified Mohamed Merah when he made his trips,” Fillon told French radio on Friday.
Intelligence agents “watched him long enough to come to the conclusion that there was no element, no indication, that this was a dangerous man who would one day pass from words to acts,” added Fillon.
The head of France’s DCRI domestic intelligence agency, Bernard Squarcini, told Le Monde newspaper there was little more that security services could have done to prevent Merah’s atrocities.
Among those criticizing the way the siege ended was a veteran police officer who said there was a lack of clear tactics by the elite RAID unit involved.
Some Israeli security experts were even harsher in their criticism.