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French police: we have copies of gunman videos

French police said on Monday they had copies of videos shot by an Islamist extremist killer during a series of shootings in and near the southern city of Toulouse that shocked the country.

The gunman’s father meanwhile said he planned to sue French authorities over the killing of his son, who was gunned down by police at the end of a 32-hour standoff following the attacks that killed seven people.

Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had previously boasted of filming his killings, and witnesses had told police that he appeared to be wearing a video camera in a chest harness.

A police source told AFP the footage had been seized after it was sent to the Paris office of the pan-Arabic satellite network Al-Jazeera. 

“It’s a video montage of the various killings set to music and readings from the Koran,” the source said, describing the footage as “sufficiently explicit”.

The source said investigators had been passed a USB memory stick that had been sent to the Paris office of Al-Jazeera, a news network financed by the Qatari royal family and watched throughout the Arab world.

Detectives visited the station Monday to pick up the evidence. The source said Al-Jazeera had not broadcast the footage but had probably retained copies.

Merah was killed on Thursday after a 32-hour siege by police from the elite RAID special intervention squad on his apartment in Toulouse.

Before the fatal shootout but during the siege, Merah told police through a barricaded door that he was behind three shootings this month in which three unarmed French soldiers, three Jewish children and a teacher were killed.

He also declared that he had uploaded footage of the attacks to the Internet, although no trace of the video had been found.

Witnesses and the anti-terrorist prosecutor assigned to the case have said that the shooter appeared to be wearing a video camera of the Go-Pro type of sports cameras harnessed to his chest during the shootings.

His father Mohamed Benalel Merah hit out against France Monday for having shot his son instead of taking him alive at the end of the siege. 

“France is a big country that had the means to take my son alive. They could have knocked him out with gas and taken him in,” he declared. “They preferred to kill him.

“I will hire the biggest named lawyers and work for the rest of my life to pay their costs. I will sue France for having killing my son.”

He also said he wanted Merah to be buried in his ancestral homeland Algeria.

“God willing, I have decided to bury my son in Algeria,” he said. “Mohamed has an Algerian passport and has been listed with the Algerian consulate in Toulouse since his birth.”

Other family members have said they want Merah to be buried in France.

As police surrounded Merah’s Toulouse apartment last week, the gunman claimed responsibility for all three attacks.

In the first two incidents he shot dead three soldiers in attacks in Toulouse and nearby Montauban.

Then last week he opened fire at a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a 30-year-old teacher, his sons aged five and four, and a seven-year-old girl.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, in mid-campaign for re-election, said Monday French security services would launch a hunt for Islamic extremists following the killing spree.

“Are there other Merahs? All the security, intelligence and police services in democratic countries are on the lookout,” Sarkozy told France Info radio.

He said the interior and justice ministries have been ordered to engage in a systematic evaluation of potential threats.

On Sunday authorities charged the gunman’s brother, 29-year-old Abdelkader Merah, with complicity in the attacks but he denied any involvement.

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SHOOTINGS

US criminologist lauds Malmö for anti-gang success

The US criminologist behind the anti-gang strategy designed to reduce the number of shootings and explosions in Malmö has credited the city and its police for the "utterly pragmatic, very professional, very focused" way they have put his ideas into practice.

US criminologist lauds Malmö for anti-gang success
Johan Nilsson/TT

In an online seminar with Malmö mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, David Kennedy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said implementing his Group Violence Intervention (GVI) strategy had gone extremely smoothly in the city.

“What really stands out about the Malmö experience is contrary to most of the places we work,” he said. “They made their own assessment of their situation on the ground, they looked at the intervention logic, they decided it made sense, and then, in a very rapid, focused and business-like fashion, they figured out how to do the work.”

He said that this contrasted with police and other authorities in most cities who attempt to implement the strategy, who tend to end up “dragging their feet”, “having huge amounts of political infighting”, and coming up with reasons why their city is too different from other cities where the strategy has been a success.

Malmö’s Sluta Skjut (Stop Shooting) pilot scheme was extended to a three-year programme this January, after its launch in 2018 coincided with a reduction in the number of shootings and explosions in the city.

“We think it’s a good medicine for Malmö for breaking the negative trend that we had,” Malmö police chief Stefan Sintéus said, pointing to the fall from 65 shootings in 2017 to 20 in 2020, and in explosions from 62 in 2017 to 17 in 2020.

A graph from Malmö police showing the reduction in the number of shootings from 2017 to 2020. Graph: Malmö Police
A graph from Malmö police showing the reduction in the number of explosions in the city between 2017 and 2020. Graph: Malmö Police

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In their second evaluation of the programme, published last month, Anna-Karin Ivert, Caroline Mellgren, and Karin Svanberg, three criminologists from Malmö University, reported that violent crime had declined significantly since the program came into force, and said that it was possible that the Sluta Skjut program was partly responsible, although it was difficult to judge exactly to what extent. 

The number of shootings had already started to decline before the scheme was launched, and in November 2019, Sweden’s national police launched Operation Rimfrost, a six-month crackdown on gang crime, which saw Malmö police reinforced by officers from across Sweden.

But Kennedy said he had “very little sympathy” for criminologists critical of the police’s decision to launch such a massive operation at the same time as Sluta Skjut, making it near impossible to evaluate the programme.

“Evaluation is there to improve public policy, public policy is not there to provide the basis for for sophisticated evaluation methodology,” he argued.

“When people with jobs to do, feel that they need to do things in the name of public safety, they should follow their professional, legal and moral judgement. Not doing something to save lives, because it’s going to create evaluation issues, I think, is simply privileging social science in a way that it doesn’t deserve.”

US criminologist David Kennedy partaking in the meeting. Photo: Richard Orange

Sluta Skjut has been based around so-called ‘call-ins’, in which known gang members on probation are asked to attend meetings, where law enforcement officials warn them that if shootings and explosions continue, they and the groups around them will be subject to intense focus from police.

At the same time, social workers and other actors in civil society offer help in leaving gang life.

Of the 250-300 young men who have been involved in the project, about 40 have been sent to prison, while 49 have joined Malmö’s ‘defector’ programme, which helps individuals leave gangs.

Kennedy warned not to focus too much on the number of those involved in the scheme who start to work with social services on leaving gang life.

“What we find in in practice is that most of the impact of this approach doesn’t come either because people go to prison or because they take services and leave gang life,” he said.

“Most of the impact comes from people simply putting their guns down and no longer being violent.”

“We think of the options as continuing to be extremely dangerous, or completely turning one’s life around. That’s not realistic in practice. Most of us don’t change that dramatically ever in our lives.”

He stressed the importance of informal social control in his method, reaching those who gang members love and respect, and encouraging them to put pressure on gang members to abstain from gun violence.

“We all care more about our mothers than we care about the police, and it turns out that if you can find the guy that this very high risk, very dangerous person respects – literally, you know, little old ladies will go up to him and get his attention and tell him to behave himself. And he will.”

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