Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

French ‘Failed’ To Stop Toulouse Killer: Report

French security “failed” in assessing the danger posed by Mohammed Merah, the French Interior Ministry said in a report about the Jihadist killer of three Jewish children and a rabbi in Toulouse in March.

The 17-page report, which was submitted on Oct. 23, confirmed that the French domestic intelligence agency DCRI had been monitoring Merah since November 2011, four months before he gunned down three French soldiers and shot four at a Jewish day school.

The “various objective failures” meant that the domestic spy service was unaware that Merah, who has had at least 15 previous criminal convictions, had attacked a neighbor with a sword in June 2010 after she complained he had shown her son a jihadi video depicting decapitation.

The report by IGPN – the French police comptroller – said the security service “identified the change in Merah’s profile very late” despite repeated warnings he had radicalized in France and abroad.

Had this change been observed, the service may have increased surveillance on Merah, who turned into an Islamist hardliner in prison in February 2008, the report found.

Merah’s transformation to a radical only became apparent to the agency two years later.

His departure to Pakistan in August last year also went unnoticed because he passed through Oman, which is not on French intelligence’s 31-country outbound travel watch list.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.