Patrick Klugman, a lawyer for the family of Jonathan Sandler, a rabbi who was shot with his two sons, said Bernard Squarcini, the former head of domestic intelligence agency DCRI, must be heard by the examining magistrate in charge of the investigation into the killings in the southern city of Toulouse.

The call follows the release to the victims' families of DCRI documents which suggest the killer should have been under much closer surveillance than he was.

The documents also make it clear that Merah was part of a broader network of Islamists in France and was in regular touch with militants around the world.
"We demand that, as a matter of urgency, Squarcini, the DCRI ag ent who was in charge of monitoring Merah and the agent in charge of his file in Paris all be brought before the magistrate," Klugman told AFP.

The lawyer said he also wanted all the agency's intelligence on Merah's brother, Abdelkader, and sister, Souad, declassified.

"The documents we've seen to date are incomplete but they do provide a very striking picture of what seems to have been a jihadi network in the southwest of France in which the Merah family were very important," he said.

"The attitude of the DCRI is incomprehensible: it seems like the more the danger represented by this family became obvious, the more the surveillance of them was scaled back."

In the latest indication that the threat represented by Merah was under-estimated, it emerged this week that he had made nearly 2,000 telephone calls between September 2010 and February 2011, one in 10 of them to people located in a total of 20 foreign countries.

During the time that his calls were being monitored, Merah called or texted numbers in Egypt at least 94 times. Other calls were made to Britain, Spain, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Croatia and Bhutan.

It had previously emerged that Merah was under surveillance from the end of 2009 and that his behaviour was classed as "worrying" in late 2011 following his return from a trip to Pakistan.

Four months after that report, Merah shot dead Sandler, his two children and one of their school-mates as well as three French paratroopers.

Merah was killed himself on March 22 following a 32-hour police siege of his flat in Toulouse.

Source: EJPress