AFP/Toulouse
President Nicolas Sarkozy, in mid-campaign for re-election, said yesterday French security services would launch a hunt for Islamic extremists following the killing spree by an Islamist gunman. Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old who claimed he had links to Al Qaeda and was killed last Thursday in a stand-off with police in Toulouse, killed seven people including three Jewish children in the attacks in southwestern France. “Are there other Merahs? All the security, intelligence and police services in democratic countries are on the lookout,” Sarkozy told France Info radio. He said the interior and justice ministries have been ordered to engage in a systematic evaluation of potential threats. On Sunday, authorities charged the gunman’s brother, 29-year-old Abdelkader Merah, with complicity in the attacks but he denied any involvement. French security services have come under fire for not preventing the three shooting sprees, which saw the killings of three off-duty French soldiers and three children and a teacher at Jewish school. The attacks have also pushed security issues up the agenda in the midst of a heated campaign for France’s April-May presidential election. Merah said he had received training in Pakistan and Afghanistan and he had been on a US “terror blacklist” banning him from US-bound flights after he was arrested in Afghanistan and sent back to France. The director general of the French national police, Frederic Pechenard, yesterday defended security services, saying it was easier to criticise in hindsight. “It’s easy now, when we have the killer’s name, to look back. It’s a bit like the lottery: it’s easy to have the six numbers in order after the fact,” he told RTL radio. He said police were facing a daunting task in evaluating the risks of other potential extremists. “There are hundreds of young French people who go to Egypt, to Yemen, to Pakistan to study the Qur’an... who are nothing more than religious,” he said. “Amid these hundreds of people are a few potential terrorists whom we need to work on.” Merah’s family is divided over whether his body should be buried in France or his ancestral homeland Algeria, Muslim officials said yesterday, While some of the family want him buried in France, where he was born, others fear his grave will be desecrated and want him buried in Algeria, said Abdallah Zekri of the French Muslim Council. He said one of the gunman’s brothers, Abdelghani Merah, had told him Merah indicated he wanted to be buried in France. The brother had asked for a “discreet” funeral to be held, Zekri said. But he said Merah’s mother, Zoulhika Aziri, had asked for her son to be buried in Algeria “to avoid his grave being vandalised”. In Algeria, Merah’s uncle Djamel Aziri said that efforts had begun to have his body transferred to the country for burial in his father’s home region of Medea, about 80km south of Algiers. “For the moment there are no obstacles. It is just a matter of procedures in France,” he said. If the funeral were to take place in France, Muslim Council chief Mohamed Moussaoui said he believed it should be conducted away from the public eye. “It is desirable that any ceremony take place anonymously for security reasons,” he said.