Al Jazeera television said on Tuesday it would not broadcast video footage of three deadly shootings in southern France filmed by an al Qaeda-inspired gunman using a camera strapped to his body. The Qatar-based news network also said it was declining all requests from other media outlets for copies of the footage.
The French government, and the CSA broadcast regulator, had urged television channels to refrain from running video clips that gunman Mohamed Merah told police he had filmed as he shot dead three Jewish children, a rabbi and three soldiers. France is still reeling from the gruesome nature of the attacks, which saw Merah grab one little girl by the hair as he shot her at point-blank range in one of three shooting sprees before he was killed by police last week.
"In accordance with Al Jazeera's Code of Ethics, given the video does not add any information that is not already in the public domain, its news channels will not be broadcasting any of its contents," a spokesman for the network said in a statement. The spokesman said Al Jazeera had passed the video footage on to the French police to help with their investigation. Al Jazeera received a memory stick at its Paris bureau late on Monday that had been mailed anonymously from Toulouse last week, as police laid siege to Merah's apartment.
It contained footage of the three shootings in chronological order, edited together with Islamic chants and readings from the Koran, Al Jazeera's Paris bureau chief Zied Tarrouche told BFM TV. Staff sent a copy of the film to the network's headquarters in Doha for management to decide how to proceed.
Merah, 23, told police negotiators last week during a more than 30-hour siege at his home that he had filmed his killings in the city of Toulouse and nearby Montauban. A fourth soldier he shot is alive but in critical condition. Coming a month before an election where Sarkozy is battling a Socialist challenger to win a second term, the killings shone a spotlight on tensions in multi-ethnic city suburbs and raised questions over possible intelligence lapses. Sarkozy, whose handling of the crisis has been praised by the public, wants a crackdown on people frequenting radical websites. He has also said he will block some Muslim preachers from coming to France for an Islamic conference next month.
On Tuesday, Sarkozy said he had asked the DCRI domestic intelligence service to work with the DGSE foreign intelligence service to make "extensive" checks on people posing a security risk and vowed to speed up deportations in public order cases. "Extremists play with our administrative formalities, our duty is to be more efficient," Sarkozy said.
Merah, who had attended an Islamist training camp in Pakistan, used a stolen scooter and a Colt .45 pistol to carry out his attacks over eight days before being cornered by police and eventually shot dead after a dramatic siege. Tarrouche said the video was difficult to watch. "You hear the voice of the person who carried out the killings. You also hear the victims' cries," he said. "My feelings are those of any human being who sees horrible things."
Sarkozy said it should not be aired. "I call on executives of all TV stations that may have the images in their possession not to broadcast them under any pretext out of respect for the victims and for France," he said, after meeting police chiefs. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the film could have a dangerous effect on people inclined to radicalism, telling Radio Classique: "This incitement to violence, to murder, on minds that are often fragile or deranged, is absolutely detestable."
Four anti-terrorist judges are heading the investigation into France's worst attack by a radical Islamist in years and are probing Merah's elder brother, Abdelkader, as an accomplice. Abdelkader, 29 and already known to security services for having helped smuggle Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007, will remain in jail for the duration of an inquiry that could last months before a decision on whether to send him to trial.
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