Report: Toulouse killer’s sister being probed for ‘excusing terror’

(JTA) — Paris prosecutors are reportedly considering indicting the sister of Mohammed Merah for saying she was proud of her brother for murdering four Jews in Toulouse. 

The investigation concerns statements made by Souad Merah in a conversation filmed by M6, a French broadcaster, according to the French daily L’Express.

A spokesman from the Paris Prosecutor’s Office told the newspaper that the comments were “excusing terrorism,” according to the paper.

Souad Merah said she was “proud” of her brother “for how he fought till the end.” According to AFP, the French news agency, the video of Souad Merah was filmed with a hidden camera while she was speaking about Mohammed Merah to another brother, Abdelghani Merah.

“The Jews are all about massacring the Muslims. I detest them,” she was also filmed as saying. “I think well of bin Laden. I told that to the cops,” she said. “I am proud of my brother, proud, proud, proud.”

In a book scheduled to hit bookstores on Wednesday, Abdelghani Merah wrote that both Souad and Mohammed Merah “hated the infidels and particularly the Jews, without any distinctions.”

“My young brother was certainly a Salafist, but before he turned into one he grew up in this detestable atmosphere that accommodates anti-Semitism,” Abdelghani Merah reportedly wrote in the new book about his brother. 

Mohammed Merah gunned down three children and a rabbi on March 19 at a Jewish school. Earlier that month he killed three French soldiers. Merah was killed in a police raid on his home as he tried to jump out the bathroom window.

The Merahs grew up with a “cultural anti-Semitism” and “despised the Jews,” Abdelghani Merah wrote in his book, according to a report in the French magazine Le Point.

France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, said Souad Merah’s words constituted an “apology for terrorism and anti-Semitism and a provocation to religious and racial hatred.”

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