"There was no single element allowing to detain Mohamed Merah," Mr Fillon told French radio. "We don't have the right in a country like ours to permanently monitor without judicial authorisation someone who hasn't committed an offence ... We live in a state of law."
Questions are being asked over how Merah, known to the authorities, managed to murder seven people, including three children, in three separate attacks, before being killed in a firefight after a 32 hour siege.
Adding to pressure on security officials, one veteran police officer asked how the gunman was not taken alive during Thursday's siege and final assault in the southwestern city of Toulouse.
Officers from an elite unit moved in Thursday morning after a 32-hour siege, killing self-proclaimed al-Qaeda militant Mohamed Merah as he tried to shoot his way out of his apartment.
The siege had interrupted the hard-fought campaign for France's April-May presidential vote, but Nicolas Sarkozy resumed his re-election bid with a rally in Strasbourg Thursday evening, where he said: "These crimes were not the work of a madman.
"A madman is irresponsible. These crimes were the work of a fanatic and a monster."
Comment: Indeed, they are the work of ideologically indoctrinated terrorists in power.
In a televised address earlier, Mr Sarkozy had vowed to crack down on extremism, saying he wanted legal action against people who regularly consulted jihadist websites or travelled abroad for indoctrination.
But some politicians were already asking how French intelligence officers had failed to head off Merah's killing spree given that he was already on their radar as an extremist.
Comment: As Joe Quinn explains, the most likely reason for this is that he was an asset, sheep-dipped in Afghanistan and Pakistan so that if they decided at some point in future to frame him in a false-flag terrorist attack, it would be possible to show that he had visited those countries "for ideological indoctrination and training with terror schools".
Mr Sarkozy's main challenger, the socialist Francois Hollande, referred to reports of possible failings in the surveillance of Merah at a rally late Thursday.
With the end of the siege, he said, "questions will have to be put."
Earlier Thursday, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in an interview with Europe 1 radio that intelligence officers had recently questioned Merah.
While he did not know if the intelligence service was at fault, he acknowledged the matter would have to be investigated.
The killings have shocked France, home to western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim minorities.
During the siege, Merah told police he had carried out all three recent attacks. In the first two, last week, he shot dead three soldiers. Then on Monday he gunned down three children and a teacher at a Jewish school.
An al-Qaeda linked group, Jund al-Khilafah, has claimed responsibility on jihadist websites for the killings.
Comment: Not quite. A US-based private intelligence firm run by former IDF soldiers has linked Merah to this JUnd al-Khilafah, one of many similar cut-out organizations on SITE Intelligence's database of expendable patsies.
Sarkozy leveraging Toulouse tragedy to push internet censorship, Organization claiming Merah link to Al Qaeda is Mossad outfit
On Thursday morning, as police from the elite RAID force stormed Merah's apartment, the 23-year-old burst out of the bathroom wearing a black djellaba, a traditional loose-fitting North African robe, and a bullet-proof vest.
He opened fire on them before jumping out the window of his first-floor apartment, still firing as he fell. He was shot in the head.
"He was dead by the time he hit the ground," one police source told AFP.
Police had been told to do everything possible to take Merah alive, but had had no choice but to fire, said Molins.
And RAID head Amaury de Hauteclocque said: "It's the first time in my life I've seen someone, as we launch an assault, launch an assault against us."
But Christian Prouteau, who founded the GIGN - another of France's elite police units - wanted to know why police had not used tear gas to flush out Merah, expressing astonishment that they had failed to capture him alive.
In an interview, with Ouest France newspaper, he asked: "How come the police's best unit did not manage to arrest a man all alone?"
Comment: Because dead men tell no tales.
Merah had said his attacks were to avenge Palestinian deaths and to punish France for its military presence in Afghanistan and the ban on full-face veils, Molins said.
He claimed to have been trained by al-Qaeda in Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan known as a haven for Islamist insurgents connected to Taliban guerrillas.
He had twice travelled to the region, on one occasion being arrested by Afghan police and handed over to US army troops. They put him on a flight back to France.
A US intelligence official said that Merah had been on America's "no-fly" list: banned from boarding flights to or from the country.
Merah had filmed the killings with a camera attached to a chest harness. Officers have viewed the footage.
During the March 11 shooting of a paratrooper in Toulouse, he can be heard saying "You kill my brothers, now I'm killing you", Molins said.
In the March 15 attack, when he killed two other paratroopers in nearby Montauban, after the attack he drives off on a scooter shouting "Allahu akbar!" (God is Greatest!).
Comment: There are no witness reports of this. This was made up after it became clear that the scapegoat was Muslim.
On Monday the gunman, again wearing a motorcycle helmet and riding a scooter, attacked the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a religious studies teacher, his two young sons and a seven-year-old girl.
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