Six suspects arrested in Toulouse shootings

French police announce six additional suspects arrested for connection to terror attacks carried out by Mohammed Merah.

By JOSEPH STRICH JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
Police check identity papers of Toulouse residents 370 R (photo credit: REUTERS)
Police check identity papers of Toulouse residents 370 R
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Six additional suspects have been arrested this week for their connection to the series of terror attacks carried out by Mohammed Merah between March 11 and 16 last year, French police announced on Wednesday.
Four of the arrests – two on Tuesday and two on Wednesday – were made in the city of Toulouse, where the young French-Algerian Islamist killed four outside the Otsar Hatorah Jewish school – three children and the father of two of them. In Montauban, a nearby city, Merah killed three French paratroopers.
Two other suspects were arrested in Paris, one on Tuesday and another on Wednesday, according to a source close to the investigation, who added that the suspected accomplices are aged between 24 and 30.
In more than a year of investigations, several men have been arrested and then released, with the exceptions of Merah’s elder brother Abdelkader, who is still in jail, and Mohammed Mounir Meskine, who was arrested on May 18 and is suspected of stealing of the scooter used by Merah in the wave of murders.
Meanwhile, the attack by a young Frenchman on a French soldier last Sunday in the suburb of La Defense near Paris is now being treated as an act of terrorism by investigators.
François Molins, a leading French state prosecutor, said that the 22-yearold man who was converted to Islam “probably acted in the name of his religious ideology.”