Mass killer’s brother detained on suspicion of complicity

French authorities have ordered the brother of an al Qaeda-inspired killer to be detained on suspicion of complicity in his sibling’s assassination of three Jewish children, a rabbi and three soldiers.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office said preliminary inquiries had produced enough material to justify detaining Abdelkader Merah while he was investigated on multiple counts.

Abdelkader, 29, was arrested at dawn on Wednesday as elite police laid siege to the Toulouse apartment of his brother Mohamed, a French citizen of Algerian extraction.

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Mohamed Merah was killed in a shootout after confessing to shooting four soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi in three separate incidents in and around the city this month.Three of the soldiers are dead and the fourth is alive but in a critical condition.

Merah does not appear to have acted as part of a fundamentalist network, but police are trying to establish whether he was swayed or given practical help by his brother, who was known to security services for helping smuggle Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007.

“Police inquiries have produced serious and matching pointers that suggest his [Abdelkader’s] participation as accomplice in crimes relating to a terrorist enterprise is plausible,” the Paris public prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Abdelkader said during a preliminary interrogation that he was proud of his brother’s killing spree but had not been involved, police sources say.

Mohamed Merah, 23, was killed by a police sniper on Thursday after a gun battle with police and a siege lasting more than 30 hours, during which he admitted to the killings.

During initial questioning, according to a police source, Abdelkader acknowledged complicity in the theft of the high-powered scooter that his brother used in the three attacks.

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