BICOM

French school shooting suspect Mohamed Merah was jailed for bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, but escaped months later in a jailbreak organised by the Taliban, according to prison documents cited by a top Afghan prison official yesterday.

Merah is believed to have made several trips to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, though the details are not yet clear. In December 2007, he was arrested and charged with planting bombs in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, for which he was sentenced to three years in jail, local prison chief Ghulam Faruq told Reuters citing prison documents. Merah apparently escaped in a jailbreak led by the Taliban in June 2008, along with several hundred other inmates.

Upon to his return to France, Merah was placed on the French authorities’ list of suspected Islamic extremists, an intelligence official has told French newspaper Libération.

Merah’s lawyer Marie-Christine Ételin in le Point has said he had only recently become “politicised”. However, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant has said Merah’s “radicalization took place in a Salafist ideological group and seems to have been firmed up by two journeys he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

In Toulouse this morning, French police have tried to flush out Merah with explosions and gunfire heard outside his apartment. Some 300 police have laid siege since Wednesday to the five-storey house in a suburb of the prosperous industrial town in a bid to capture Merah. It is no longer clear if Merah is still alive, as following this mornings raid he appears to have broken off contact with negotiators.

On Wednesday, those slain at the Jewish school, all of French-Israeli nationality, were buried in Israel. The bodies of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 3, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsenego had been flown there yesterday.