Justice wonders about possible stays in Syria of relatives of the terrorist, after the killings of Toulouse and Montauban.
Six women close to Mohamed Merah’s family were arrested on Tuesday (October 4th) in Toulouse as part of an investigation by the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat), which suspects them of having stayed in Syria in 2013 and 2014, said a judicial source, confirming information from Europe 1.
Residents of Toulouse and Albi, five of them were arrested at their homes in the Toulouse region and a sixth presented herself to the police station, according to a source familiar with the matter.
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The investigation, entrusted to the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (Sdat), has been open since 2014 for criminal association of criminal terrorists and evasion of parents from their legal obligations.
Among these women, aged 31 to 43, some had left with their children for Syria. Suspected for several years by the anti-terrorism justice, several of them had already been heard and then released. But new elements led the investigators to hear them again.
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They are part of the entourage of the Merah family, but are not members of the family. More than ten years ago, Mohamed Merah killed seven people, between March 11 and 19, 2012, in Montauban and Toulouse.
He had assassinated three soldiers – Imad Ibn Ziaten, Abel Chennouf and Mohamed Legouad -, a professor and three Jewish children – Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arié and Gabriel, and Myriam Monsonégo – before being killed by the police after a siege of 32 hours followed by the media around the world.
His brother Abdelkader was definitively sentenced in 2020 to thirty years’ imprisonment for complicity in his crimes.
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