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The Muslim fanatic who cold-bloodedly assassinated three young children and a rabbi in a southern French city had been held by US forces in Afghanistan — but they quickly shipped him back to France, it was revealed yesterday.
During one of two trips to Afghanistan, Mohammed Merah was detained at a roadblock by Afghan cops and turned over to US soldiers, according to Francois Molins, a French prosecutor. Soon afterward, the United States washed its hands of him and “put him on the first plane headed to France,’’ Molins said.
Once in France, he was allowed to live freely in Toulouse, despite his known radical views.
It was not immediately clear why the Americans and French failed to detain him. Molins said Merah was suffering from hepatitis.
US officials are aiding the probe of why he was let go by both countries.
Merah — who was locked in a standoff with 300 French police officers last night — was well known to intelligence agencies long before he opened fire on a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday, sources said.
Throughout the siege, Merah, 23, kept boasting to the cops, while brandishing an AK-47. He bragged about committing the murders at the school and also confessed to the fatal shootings of three French soldiers in two earlier attacks, officials said.
“He said he had planned to attack a solider on Monday but, unable to find a target, he took aim at the Jewish school,” said Claude Guéant, the French interior minister. He added that Merah had planned more attacks.
“He expressed no regret, apart from not having had enough time to kill more victims, and even boasted of having brought France to its knees,” Molins said.
Explosions were heard around midnight near the apartment building where Merah was holed up. French authorities said the blasts were attempts to get Merah to leave.
“He said he wanted to give himself up. He changed his mind, so we’re stepping up on the pressure on him to surrender,” a source said.
The stunning revelation that the mad jihadist was once in the hands of the US Army came as Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, his two sons, Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4, and a cousin, Myriam Monsenego, 8, were laid to rest in Jerusalem, in a funeral that drew 1,000 mourners, including the French foreign minister.
Merah — an ethnic Algerian born in France — spent his youth as a petty criminal, racking up 18 arrests, before paying his visits to Afghanistan.
He bragged yesterday that he received terrorist trained in the lawless Pakistani stronghold of Waziristan, said Molins.
It was unclear if he really got terrorist training or had genuine links to al Qaeda. But French security officials long had him on their radar, according to an Interior Ministry official who said Merah’s “fundamentalist” Islamic views were widely known.
He tried to enlist in the French military twice but was rebuffed.
He claims to be a mujahedeen, or freedom fighter, with the al Qaeda-inspired group Forsane Alizza, or Knights of Glory. The French group, known more for threats than actual violence, was banned in January for recruiting radicals to wage jihad in Afghanistan. The group also raged against the French ban on the Muslim hijab for women.
Merah’s brother Abdelkader had been implicated in a 2007 conspiracy to send militants to Iraq to fight American troops. The brother, along with their mother, have now been detained, authorities said.
Investigators zeroed in on Merah after one of his brothers, it’s not clear which, tried to have the GPS tracker removed from a stolen motorcycle that was used in the attacks.
That tip helped prompt the morning raid that led to the siege. Merah had also used a brother’s computer to make arrangements to meet his first victim, a French paratrooper, under the pretense of selling a motorcycle. He then executed the soldier.
He is believed to have video-recorded the Jewish-school attack to distribute on radical Web sites.
Meanwhile, friends and family members of the Sandlers and Monsenegos, all dual-French-Israeli citizens, tried to make sense of the violence.
“My daughter is friends with Mrs. Sandler, [Rabbi] Sandler’s wife. The world is constantly saying attacks against Jews are justified because of Israeli policies,’’ said Yosef Abtan, 64, after the Jerusalem funeral. “Where is the world when innocent Jewish children are gunned down in France? People who kill Jews are doing it because they hate Jews. Period.”
In the US, relatives of the Sandler family, whose roots are in Morocco, also mourned.
“In Morocco, we had no problems with Muslims. They were our brothers. It is the only country were Muslims and Jews live peacefully,” said Henriette Sasson, of Saddle River, NJ, the great-aunt of the Sandler kids. “This killer, he hates himself, he hates the world, so he kills people.”
She said that Rabbi Sandler, a special-education teacher, had just moved back to France to work at the school after living for several years in Israel.
“He was so dedicated. He decided to come and teach kids with special needs for two years. . . . And in six months, he is dead. They are dead,’’ Sasson said.
In France, the drama continued to captivate the nation.
During standoff negotiations — and in a bizarre phone call to a TV station — the suspect said his attacks were revenge for French military action in Afghanistan and for the deaths of Palestinian children in the Middle East.
His attacks, which started March 11, so shocked the country that all presidential campaigning had been halted.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed, “Terrorism will not be able to fracture our national community.”
Some people who know Merah expressed shock, saying he was into women, bikes, clubs and soccer — not terrorism.
“Three weeks ago, he was in a nightclub,” said an acquaintance, Mehdi Nedder, 31.
“And this morning I hear we’re talking about al Qaeda.”