France's prime minister rejected accusations on Friday that intelligence lapses allowed a young Muslim with a violent criminal record, spotted twice in Afghanistan, to become the first al Qaeda-inspired killer to strike on its soil. Hardened by battling Islamic militants from its former North African colony of Algeria, the French security services have long been regarded as among the most effective in Europe, having prevented militant attacks on French soil for the last 15 years.
Opposition politicians, including far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, suggested that negligence or errors had permitted Mohamed Merah, 23, to carry out three deadly shootings within 10 days before he was identified, located and killed. But Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the police and intelligence agencies had done an exemplary job.
"Resolving a criminal case of this importance in 10 days, I believe that's practically unprecedented in the history of our country," Fillon told RTL radio. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe had appeared to acknowledged on Thursday that there were grounds to question possible security flaws, saying: "We need to bring some clarity to this."
Merah shot dead three Jewish children and four adults in three separate attacks despite having been under surveillance by the DCRI domestic intelligence agency, which questioned him as recently as November. "Since the DCRI was following Mohamed Merah for a year, how come they took so long to locate him?" Socialist party security spokesman Francois Rebsamen asked on the JDD.fr website. Merah's elder brother Abdelkader, 29, who is now under police questioning, was also on a security watch list after being linked with the smuggling of Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007, government officials said.
The left-leaning daily Liberation asked in an editorial whether the intelligence services had not "failed miserably". "How could they have so underestimated the potential danger of an individual they already knew?"
Merah, a French citizen of Algerian extraction, amassed a cache of at least eight guns under the noses of French intelligence, including several Colt .45 pistols of the kind he used in the shootings, but also at least one Uzi submachine gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun.
In Washington, two US officials said Merah was on a US government "no fly" list, barring him from boarding any US-bound aircraft. The officials said that his name had been on the list for some time. The officials said the entry included sufficient biometric detail to make clear the man on the blacklist was the same person involved in the Toulouse shootings. He was put on the list because US officials deemed him a potential threat to aviation, one of the officials said.
Rebsamen said that after the shooting of two paratroopers in Montauban, near Toulouse, on March 15, Merah's name was on top of a DCRI list of 20 people to be particularly closely watched in the southwestern Midi-Pyrenees region. Yet the agency appeared to have lost his trace. Investigators only tracked down Merah on Tuesday, a day after he had shot dead three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Interior Minister Claude Gueant said Merah was identified with certainty when a police helicopter overflew his home and he came to the window.
Police came up with his name when a list of 576 people who viewed an Internet advertisement placed by the shooter's first victim was compared with the DCRI's watchlist on Monday and led them to the IP address of Merah's mother. He had, however, been known to the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI) - the powerful super agency created by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 - since 2010. Merah first visited Afghanistan that year, was stopped at a road checkpoint by Afghan police in Kandahar province and sent back to France by American forces.
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