KHI 23-03-2012_Layout 1 3/23/2012 1:59 AM Page 16
16 Foreign News
Friday, 23 March, 2012
French ‘al Qaeda’ suspect dies in violent last stand tOuLOuSE AfP
A
SELF-PROCLAIMED al Qaeda militant died in a hail of bullets on Thursday as he jumped out of an apartment window at the end of a 32-hour siege in southern France. Mohamed Merah, the main suspect in a wave of shootings that killed seven people, had tried to blast his way out of the siege in the city of Toulouse after members of an elite force known as RAID entered his flat. But Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the 23-year-old had been found dead on the ground in a dramatic end to the lengthy standoff. “The killer came out from the bathroom shooting very violently.
The bursts of gunfire were frequent and hard,” Gueant said. “A RAID officer who is used to this kind of thing told me that he had never seen such a violent assault. “RAID officers of course tried to protect themselves, to return fire, and then in the end, Mohamed Merah jumped out of the window with a gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground.” The exact cause of the death was not immediately clear. Merah’s flat was reportedly on the first floor above the ground floor. Sustained bursts of gunfire had been heard outside the apartment shortly after sources told AFP police were moving “rapidly” to end the siege, but progressing “step by step” through the apartment in fear of booby traps. A total of around 300 shots were
fired. Three loud explosions near the apartment were heard shortly before police said the officers had moved in, and an ambulance was then seen passing through a security cordon. Merah had been holed up since Tuesday night after being tracked down by police as the main suspect in a wave of shootings that killed seven people, including three soldiers and three Jewish children. Gueant had earlier said police had lost contact with Merah but that he had told authorities he wanted “to die weapons in hand”. Prosecutors said Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, had fought off several police assaults on the flat on Wednesday and bragged to negotiators of having been trained by Al-Qaeda on the AfghanistanPakistan border.
Sarkozy vows to crack down on extremist indoctrination PARIS AfP
French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed on Thursday to crack down on extremist indoctrination in the wake of the murder of seven people by a selfproclaimed Islamist militant. He said he wanted legal action against people who regularly consulted jihadist websites or who travelled abroad for indoctrination and said he wanted to stop French jails being a breeding ground for extremism. “Henceforth, any person who habitually consults Internet sites which praise terrorism and which call for hatred and violence will be punished under criminal law,” he said in a televised address. Any person who travels abroad for “indoctrination into ideologies which lead to terrorism” will be prosecuted, Sarkozy said, shortly after the alleged killer of the seven was shot dead by police in Toulouse. The president added that he had asked his justice minister to investigate the propagation of extremist ideologies in French prisons.
french intelligence under fire over ‘al Qaeda’ serial killer
Threat of strike on Iran is working: Israel’s Barak jERuSALEM AfP
The threat of a military strike on Iran is preventing the Islamic republic from taking the final steps towards developing a nuclear bomb, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Thursday. “We are seeing with our own eyes the reason why Iran, which really wants to achieve a military nuclear capability, is not taking some of the steps defined by the IAEA as breaking the rules, why it is not breaking out,” he told public radio, referring to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. “One of the reasons is the fear of what will happen if, God forbid, the United States or maybe someone else acts against them,” Barak said, referring to the threat of an air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel and Washington disagree over the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat, and the only way to overcome this disagreement was to step up the sanctions imposed on Tehran and to ensure the upcoming talks achieved results, Barak said. “There’s a point of disagreement and the only way of getting over it and resolving it is by accelerating the sanctions, and by setting down a short timetable for the talks next month, to test if they mean to stop their nuclear programme or not,” he said.
PARIS AfP
The French government went on the defensive Thursday amid questions over why its intelligence service had failed to deal with petty criminal turned alleged jihadist serial killer Mohamed Merah. With hindsight, Merah’s past appears to make him an obvious suspect — he had at least 15 criminal convictions, some with violence, had become a radical Islamist and travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He and his brother were both known to French intelligence because of their fundamentalist Salafist ideology. One press report said that in 2010 Merah forced a youth to watch videos of Al-Qaeda hostage beheadings. When the boy’s mother complained, Merah allegedly attacked her, putting her in hospital for several days. Merah allegedly later went into the street outside the women’s house, wearing military fatigues and brandishing a sword, shouting “I’m with Al-Qaeda,” the Telegramme newspaper reported. A criminal complaint was lodged and police interviewed the woman but apparently there was no follow up. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who has been lambasting Muslim immigration as part of her presidential election campaign, was quick to accuse the government of “laxity” towards the “fundamentalist risk”. Socialist Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a former defence and interior minister, said the killings were “a warning for services in charge of anti-terrorism”.
TouLouSe: french members of the RAID special police forces unit leave after the assault on the besieged flat of self-professed al qaeda militant Mohamed Merah on Thursday. AfP
Despite shootings, extremist Islam waning in France: experts PARIS AfP
Muslims in French suburbs remain vulnerable to extremist indoctrination but those lured into radicalism are an “ultraminority” and the spread of jihadism is declining, experts say. Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old suspected Al-Qaeda militant of Algerian descent was killed Thursday following a shootout with police, after being linked to seven murders in southwestern France in the last eight days. The former resident of a Toulouse suburb is believed to have been drawn into radicalism after joining a group of Salafists — an ultra-conservative brand of Islam — and travelling to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such trips to Aghanistan “were quite common in the 1990s,” amid the euphoria of the muja-
hedeen victory over Soviet troops who had invaded the country, said Samir Amghar, author of “Salafism Today.” “A number of people went to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train,” explained the sociology professor at France’s School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. “But for several years, we have seen a decline in jihadism because of the strong pressure of the French and European security services,” he added. He said current estimates put the number of Salafists in France at between 12,000 and 15,000, but “jihadist Salafists are an ultra-minority.” Gilles Kepel, author of “Jihad, The Trail of Political Islam,” said it was “worrying when the Salafists impose their rules, for example, wearing of the full veil, on other Muslims.” “When there is a rupture between their values and the values
of the French Republic, it makes fertile terrain for radical Islam,” he stressed, adding that extremist recruiters target those “who are marginalised.” They are speaking “in a general manner to people in working class neighbourhoods, but not strictly to the working classes. Radicals also target “a strong proportion who are from the middle and upper classes. People who have studied, who are university graduates,” Amghar said. But, he explained, the channels through which extremist recruiters connect with new sympathisers have evolved since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. “In the 1990s, the radical imams, the preachers, were able to recruit in the mosques,” he said. “After September 11, because of the surveillance of the French intelligence services in the mosques, it became very
difficult. The recruitment from then on happened through interpersonal relations, or over the internet. Bernard Godard, co-author of “Muslims in France”, said probing Merah’s path to radicalisation was a crucial next step. “We’ll have to see how he was initiated, how he was fed jihadism,” Godard said. Speaking Thursday after Merah was killed, French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to crack down on extremist indoctrination. He said he wanted legal action against people who regularly consulted jihadist websites or who travelled abroad for indoctrination and an end to French jails being a breeding ground for extremism. “Henceforth, any person who habitually consults Internet sites which praise terrorism and which call for hatred and violence will be punished under criminal law,” he said in a televised address.
Riyadh eases ban on single men in shopping malls RIYADH AfP
Single men in Riyadh will be able to visit shopping malls during peak hours after a Saudi prince eased restrictions aimed at stopping harassment of women, media reports said Thursday. Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz, Riyadh’s governor, has decided “not to prevent any single men from visiting malls” in the capital on evenings and weekends, when malls are most crowded, AlRiyadh newspaper reported. The decision was made by a committee made up of local officials and representatives from the feared religious police, said the daily. Shopping malls are a favourite leisure destination for young men and women in the ultra-conservative kingdom, where cinemas and theatres are banned. Previously, single men were only allowed into shopping centres at lunch time on weekdays, a move the authorities said was intended to prevent women being harassed during peak hours. But that had “many negative consequences, including the gathering of men outside the shopping malls and harassing women” there, the daily reported, according to the committee.