© Reuters
The family of Mohamed Merah, whom French police accused of carrying out a wave of deadly shootings in Toulouse and Montauban between March 11 and 19, has emphatically denied that he was a terrorist or carried out the killings. Merah was killed by an elite police unit after a 32-hour siege of his flat last Thursday.
His half-brother Rachid Merah, who lives in Algeria, told FranceInfo television: "I have no idea of what the media and the politicians are talking about. They say that Mohammed has been in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that he was in contact with Al Qaeda. But I categorically deny it. And I doubt whether he has had any links with Al Qaeda or the Taliban or any terrorist organisation in the world. And proof of that is that France killed him before he could speak in court, when they could have caught him alive."
Rachid Merah's comments come after similar questions were raised by police experts, such as Claude Prouteau of the Intervention Group of the National Gendarmerie (GIGN), who noted that the special police unit that killed Merah could easily have captured him alive. Instead, the police stormed Merah's flat and killed him in a hail of nearly 300 bullets. During the siege, Interior Minister Claude Guéant nonetheless had asserted that everything would be done to capture Merah alive, so he could stand trial.
Commenting on the weapons and videos of the shooting that police reportedly found in Merah's flat, Rachid Merah referred to well-publicized reports that Merah was functioning as an informer for French intelligence: "But as for the weapons we can suppose that he was manipulated by the French secret services, because he was young and easily influenced. They could well have bought him. They used him then they killed him. All scenarios are possible. Who can prove that Mohamed Merah filmed the videos [of the shootings] himself? It could well be someone else."
Comment: Lets assume for a moment that the US indeed leaked the news to discourage Israel from attacking Iran, out of fear that the American military would be forced to get involved. This implies, among other things, that the American imperial machine is out of control, since it is so easy for a small and troublesome nation to push it into a war it would rather not have at the moment. Then again, is this not what Israel does best, i.e. manipulate others into fighting its expansionist wars?