Abdelkader Merah, brother of the Islamist gunman who killed seven people in southwest France, was charged yesterday with complicity in the murders, a judicial source said.
Known to police for fundamentalist religious convictions
The older brother of Mohamed Merah has also been indicted for involvement in preparing a terrorist attack, said the source.
Abdelkader, 29, and his girlfriend were taken in for questioning on Wednesday, a day before Mohamed died in a hail of police bullets after a 32-hour siege on his apartment in Toulouse. The girlfriend was released without charge earlier yesterday but Abdelkader was taken from the French police’s anti-terrorist headquarters in a Paris suburb to face an investigating judge in the city’s central courts.
“An inquiry into complicity in murder and criminal conspiracy with a view to preparing terrorist acts was opened Sunday” into Abdelkader Merah, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
Police said Abdelkader Merah has claimed to be “proud” of his brother’s acts and admitted he accompanied his brother to a Yamaha dealership where Mohamed, 23, asked in vain how to deactivate the GPS on a scooter he had just stolen. Abdelkader also told police he was present when his brother stole the powerful scooter on which he fled after carrying out his attacks that killed three soldiers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a trainee rabbi, police said.
Prosecutors said on Wednesday that it appeared Abdelkader may have been involved in a network that took jihadists to Iraq in 2007. Police and prosecutors have described Abdelkader as a more radical Islamist than his brother. The elder brother has long been known to police for his “fundamentalist religious convictions”, a police source said.
Several thousand people, including Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe, took part in a march in the capital yesterday in honour of Mohamed Merah’s victims. He filmed his three attacks with a camera strapped to his body and police said yesterday that he planned to claim responsibility for the carnage on the internet along with the footage he planned to post on the web.