A 'lone wolf'?
March 22, 2012
The suspected killer behind the attacks at Toulouse and Montauban is believed to be a French citizen of Algerian background. French media gave his name as Mohamed Merah and said he had spent time in Afghanistan.
According to French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, the alleged killer claimed to have links with al Qaeda. The Islamist terrorist network has a north African branch known as al Qaeda in the Maghreb, yet it remains unclear whether Mohamed Merah had any contact with the group. According to media reports, he has been under surveillance by the authorities for years.
Joachim Krause, head of the Kiel Institute for Security Policy (ISPK), believes the danger of Islamist terrorism in France is very high. The country is a target of al Qaeda in the Maghreb, and it is quite possible that the group is planning terror attacks in France, Krause told DW.
"There are connections, there are cells in France," he said. "And these are connections that the authorities are now going to investigate."
France is part of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, and both the Taliban and al Qaeda have long been calling for the complete withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan.
Islamist attacks since 1995
Should the suspicions that the attacker was an Islamist extremist be confirmed, the incidents would be the worst Islamist terror attacks France has seen since the 1990s. In summer and fall of 1995, the country was rocked by a string of attacks that were all attributed to the Algerian Islamist group GIA that allegedly wanted to carry the Algerian civil war across the Mediterranean to France.
The worst incident was a bomb attack on the Paris metro on July 25, 1995, which killed eight and wounded 80. French police at the time did not find any direct links to al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but authorities suspected a close connection between the extremists hiding in Afghanistan and the GIA group in Algeria. French police and intelligence agencies managed to arrest leading figures of GIA and to curb further attacks planned against several targets, including the 1998 football World Cup in France. In 2000, German and French authorities prevented an attack on the Christmas market in Strasbourg.
2010 arrests
In the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001 in the US, France, like the rest of Europe, stepped up its fight against terrorists. In October 2010, French police arrested eleven terror suspects in Marseille, Avignon and Bordeaux. All were accused of having ties to northern African terrorists. Just before, in July 2010, al Qaeda in the Maghreb had killed a French hostage. Then Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux spoke of a "real threat" to the country.
France has been on the second highest terror level ever since the bomb attacks on the London metro and busses in July 2005. This means that some 3,400 soldiers are patrolling special sites across the country. The Eiffel Tower among the places guarded by soldiers with machine guns. Since the Toulouse and Montauban attacks, security has been stepped up even further.
'Islam does not equal terror'
As early as 2005, the Nixon Center in Washington released a study suggesting that most terror suspects in Europe are in fact not from the Middle East or Afghanistan. As many as 41 percent are European citizens while 36 percent are from the Maghreb. The recruits for the terror networks in France often come from the poor suburbs of large French cities, a profile that fits the suspected attacker in Toulouse and Montauban.
The Council of Jewish Organizations in France (CRIF) has reported an increase in anti-Semitic crimes in the country, though after peaking in 2009 with 832 registered crimes, the trend has gone down in the last two years. In 2011, 389 anti-Semitic crimes where reported in France. The high point in 2009 was linked to the fighting in Gaza in January of that year.
"It is entirely unacceptable to bring the Middle East conflict over to France," said then CRIF President Richard Prasquier. But anti-Semitic crimes are not always the work of Islamist extremists – right-wing terrorists are also behind the attacks.
The French president on Wednesday warned against equating Islam with terrorism, a sentiment echoed by Jewish and Muslim organizations, who warned against simplistic conclusions.
Author: Bernd Riegert / ai
Editor: Ben Knight