An angry France won a pledge yesterday from the Al-Jazeera news channel not to air a video shot by an Islamist extremist during a murderous shooting spree targeting soldiers and Jewish children.
President Nicolas Sarkozy demanded that the channel not broadcast the video sent to its Paris bureau, which includes graphic footage shot by Mohammed Merah during attacks this month in southern France that left seven people dead.
French officials also reacted with fury to threats from Merah’s Algerian father to sue Paris over the way in which he was slain in a gunbattle with police last Thursday at the end of a 32-hour siegeof his Toulouse flat.
And police said they believed the Al-Qaeda inspired gunman, branded a “monster”, may have had one or more accomplices who possibly sent the footage to Al-Jazeera and helped him steal the scooter used in the attacks.
“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,” the Qatar-based network said.
The pan-Arab channel, which once owed much of its fame outside the Arab world to airing recordings of Al-Qaeda’s late chief, Osama bin Laden, said it had declined “numerous requests from media outlets for copies of the video.”
Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had previously boasted of filming his killings and witnesses had told police that he appeared to be wearing a video camera in a chest harness during the shootings.