Two new suspects in the Merah affair were arrested in Toulouse on Tuesday,
almost a year after Mohamed Merah killed three soldiers and four Jewish
civilians in the area.
According to a judicial source, the new suspects
were “acquaintances of Merah.”
They were put under close watch this
weekend, before the Direction centrale du renseignement interieur (DCRI)
intelligence agency arrested them early on Tuesday morning in Toulouse’s Mirail
quarter, where the Merah and his brothers had many connections.
Interior
Minister Manuel Valls, whose ministry oversees the DCRI, told reporters at an
international conference in Brussels that “the famous theory of the lone wolf
doesn’t stand.”
In three separate attacks between March 11 and 19, 2012,
Merah, a 23-year-old Franco-Algerian, shot seven people to death. Four of them
were killed on one day outside a Jewish school in Toulouse – a teacher, his two
children and the daughter of the headmaster.
On March 22, the RAID
antiterrorist police killed Merah after a siege on his apartment.
Since
then, the investigators have been looking for possible accomplices in the
attacks. Immediately after Merah’s death, authorities arrested his older
brother, Abdelkader, who seems to have participated in the preparation of the
terrorist attacks, and is still under arrest. A judge most recently questioned
him on January 3.
A third brother, Abdelghani, published a book in late
2012 where he evoked the hypothesis of a “third man,” citing the videos of the
murders filmed by Merah.
In early December, a 38- year-old man who
converted to Islam and who knew Merah, was arrested, then released.
|