As police in balaclavas and forensic suits pored over the bullet-scarred ground-floor apartment in Toulouse that had been the centre of France's most dramatic gun siege, the country was in a state of shock, grief and, above all, confusion.
For 10 days a gunman on a motorcycle terrorised south-western France, striking first in two attacks on French soldiers, one shot at point-blank range in Toulouse and three more shot days later at a cashpoint in nearby Montauban. Then on Monday the attacker rode up to a Jewish school and shot dead three children and a rabbi, firing an automatic Colt handgun at their temples. He chased one of the victims, a seven-year-old girl, pulled her by the hair and shot her while filming it on a video camera around his neck.
As France launched one of its biggest manhunts, the media speculated that a crazed neo-nazi, perhaps an ex-paratrooper, was behind the attacks in which two of the soldiers killed were Muslim.
The suspect turned out to be Mohamed Merah, a French 23-year-old unemployed panel-beater and convicted juvenile delinquent. He was known to have violent tendencies, lived not far from the two Toulouse crime scenes, claimed allegiance to al-Qaida, and had been under surveillance by security services for years.
How was it possible that police had not picked him up earlier, and could the school massacre have even been avoided? A month before the first round of the French presidential election, these questions raised on the front page of newspapers and on rolling news channels, by opposition politicians and by the relatives of some of the murdered soldiers, have put the government on the defensive.
Merah had been on a police watch-list and was last interviewed by intelligence agents in November to explain a suspect trip to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which he said was a holiday. His biometric details were on the US government no-fly list, barring him from boarding any aircraft bound for America. In 2010 a neighbour had filed a legal complaint about him forcing a local teenager to watch violent jihadist propaganda videos, and he was said to have appeared in combat fatigues and threatened the boy's sister with a sword. He had amassed a vast cache of weapons, including at least one Uzi submachine gun and a pump-action shotgun.
Bernard Squarcini, the French intelligence chief who is a key ally of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, replied to criticism of the slow police response, saying: "We couldn't go any faster." He told Le Monde it was impossible for the police to have foreseen the school attack because Merah claimed he hadn't planned it. "He wanted to kill another soldier but he got there too late. And as he knew the neighbourhood he improvised and attacked the Ozar Hatorah school."
One of the key leads that eventually pointed to Merah dated back to the first attack on 11 March. Imad Ibn-Ziaten, the French Muslim soldier who was Merah's first victim, had placed an advert online to sell a motorbike. A search of computer IP addresses that had consulted the advert threw up the name of Merah's mother, whose two sons were known to the police. But it took days to make the connection. François Fillon, the prime minister, defended the police investigation.
As the political row intensified, the extreme-right Marine Le Pen of the National Front suggested French intelligence may have missed the gunman partly because it had been diverted by Sarkozy's government to snoop on journalists and political opponents. Squarcini is under investigation himself for ordering the illegal surveillance of Le Monde reporters' telephones.
Much of the controversy centres on the siege. Police elite squads arrived at Merah's flat at 3am on Wednesday and tried to break the door down, but he responded with automatic gunfire. For 32 hours, as France was glued to its television sets, police besieged the flat with orders to only take Merah alive. At 11.10am on Thursday an elite squad moved in, unsure if Merah, who had fallen silent, was dead. But he had tricked them, barricaded his flat and was hiding in a bullet-proof vest in his bathroom, up to his shins in water after earlier shooting had burst a pipe. He ran out, opened fire on police and was shot by a sniper as he jumped from the window, still firing. Commentators questioned how it had taken so long to get one suspect who had no hostages, and to fail to bring him to justice alive. The head of a rival elite gendarme unit said Merah should have been blasted with teargas and wouldn't have "lasted five minutes". Police sources dismissed the option as dangerous and illegal.
Much of the detail of the case now focuses on 15 hours of conversation Merah had with police via a walkie-talkie while he was holed up in his flat, extracts of which were made public by the state prosecutor. Merah claimed to be a jihadist trained by al-Qaida. Police described the exchange as his "last testament before dying".
During the siege he asked to speak to a local police chief who had recently interviewed him about his trip to Pakistan. "Anyway I'd been about to call you to tell you I had a tip-off to give you, but it was going to be fake," he said.
French officials on Friday painted a portrait of Merah as a lone wolf, saying there was no sign he was commissioned by al-Qaida and no evidence he had "trained or been in contact with organised groups or jihadists", saying he might have just wanted to latch onto the global "brand". They said he had self-radicalised in prison, where he spent nearly two years as a teenager after stealing a handbag. Merah's lawyer said he been a polite and tolerant teenager, but resentful about that prison sentence and angry at being rejected by the army.
Squarcini said Merah had no "external attributes" of a fundamentalist, although when he had passed through the child courts numerous times for petty crime officials had detected a "psychological fragility", someone who had difficulty accepting his parents' divorce and his father's return to Algeria, where the family had its roots.
Merah's background of petty crime and poor schooling on a housing estate in a drab neighbourhood of Toulouse has catapulted the question of social inequalities and the integration of minorities in France back onto centre stage in the electoral campaign. Some said the social alienation and discrimination felt by second and third generation, ethnic minority French youths must be addressed in the campaign.
"He's French, but in reality he has different origins, doesn't he? France is infested with them," said one elderly architect near the gun siege.
"What Merah did was a repulsive, criminal act, it has nothing to do with Islam," said Medhi Neder, who worked in an advertising firm and knew Merah by sight. "Young people from these neighbourhoods are scared of being stigmatised by this. We're French. If this stops us having a job, stops us walking down the street with our heads held high, turns us in on ourselves because we feel let down by the Republic, that will be hard to repair. This mustn't be used to stigmatise people."
François Bayrou, the centrist presidential candidate, warned of the "worrying state of France", and fragile social cohesion. The election campaign in recent weeks had been slammed as divisive, with Sarkozy accused of courting the anti-immigration extreme right by pushing issues such as halal meat. But Sarkozy shot back at a campaign rally in Strasbourg: "No. There is not a climate in France that can explain these crimes." He said to look for an explanation for this "fanatic act" was "morally unforgivable".
Instead, the president has put the fight against terrorism at the centre of his difficult fight for re-election in the vote in April and May. Already before the attacks some commentators had likened his campaigning style to that of George W Bush in 2004, fighting for re-election by styling himself as the great protector against a danger and threat, which last month was the economic crisis. Now, that danger is terrorism, as it was for Bush, and Sarkozy was quick to promise a raft of new anti-terrorist laws including an internet clampdown. His ruling rightwing party has also attacked the Socialist frontrunner François Hollande for not prioritising issues of security and fighting crime. Hollande, who said any "failings" in the Merah operation must be examined, told a rally it was wrong to say the left was lax on crime and the right was exemplary at fighting it.
