Toulouse Shootings: The Making of a French Jihadi Killer With a Double Life
His criminal career began with a volley of rocks - a handful of stones hurled at a passing bus by a bored delinquent.
It ended in a hail of 300 bullets, fired by France’s most elite police after a 32-hour siege worthy of a Hollywood action movie.
In the space of a few years, Mohamed Merah rose from petty criminal to lethal jihadist - a man who fired at point blank range into the heads of school children, murdering seven people in a nine-day rampage.
The 23-year-old’s violent life story finally came to an end on Thursday morning, when police in Toulouse shot him in the head after an intense six-minute gunfight.
How did a small-time thief become a terrifying “lone wolf” terrorist, suspected of travelling throughout the Middle East to receive jihadist training? Why did he kill in cold blood three soldiers, a Jewish teacher and three young schoolchildren? Who was the real Mohamed Merah?
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His childhood friends in the tough northern Toulouse suburb of Izards all want answers.
“I just cannot believe he did all that,” said 22-year-old Nico - a gangly, tracksuited youth with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled tightly around his pale face. “He was one of us; he wasn’t some religious fanatic. He never even went to the mosque.”
Aimen, a youth worker in his thirties whose sister is married to Merah’s oldest brother, added: “Everyone is in shock. It doesn’t seem real yet.”
Aimen was initially a suspect himself in the murders, and exactly 24 hours before the raid on Merah’s flat, 40 armed police shot down Aimen’s door in a dawn raid and arrested him. Owning the same kind of motorbike as the assassin, he initially fitted the profile.
“I have the bullet holes in my living room walls to show for it,” he said grimly. “It was a huge shock to me. But then this whole story is shocking. People here thought he was just one of them”
And indeed, his childhood was one shared by millions of young men across France. Born in Toulouse to a family of Algerian origin, Mohamed grew up in Izards with his two sisters - Aicha, who is not religious, and the more devout Souad - plus two brothers, Abdelkader, 29, and his eldest sibling, Abdelghani.
Yesterday, Merah’s mother, Zoulikha, 54, said she was “wracked with guilt” at having been unable to prevent his killing spree. “She is asking herself whether she could have stopped him,” said her lawyer, Jean-Yves Gougnaud, speaking after she was released from police custody late on Friday.