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.
With gunman Mohamed Merah shot dead by police on Thursday after a siege at his home, the focus of the investigation has shifted to his elder brother, already known to security services for helping smuggle Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007.
Abdelkader, 29, was arrested at dawn on Wednesday as elite police commandos surrounded the Toulouse apartment of his brother Mohamed. Moved to the DCRI domestic intelligence service’s headquarters in Paris on Saturday, he could be formally placed under investigation in the hours ahead.
Mohamed, a French citizen of Algerian origin, was killed by a police sniper as he scrambled from his apartment window while firing at special force commandos who stormed his home after a more than 30-hour standoff.
He had earlier told negotiators via walkie-talkie that he was the gunman who shot at four soldiers, three children and a rabbi in three separate incidents. Three of the soldiers died and the fourth is alive but in a critical condition.
The killings shocked France a month before a presidential election in which conservative Nicolas Sarkozy is fighting an uphill battle for re-election.
Mohamed Merah, 23, 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,
“Police inquiries have produced serious and matching pointers that suggest his (Abdelkader’s) participation as an accomplice in crimes relating to a terrorist enterprise is plausible,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
It listed the suspected offenses as complicity in assassination and in robbery, and colluding with criminals planning terrorist enterprises. It may take months or years before a trial is ordered or the case dropped.
Abdelkader Merah’s wife had been detained with him but was released without charge on Sunday.
Abdelkader said during a preliminary interrogation that he was proud of his brother’s killing spree but had not been involved, police sources say.
Francois Molins, the prosecutor leading the case in Paris, where Abdeklader Merah has been transferred, said police had found explosives in a car he owned.
French media on Sunday quoted friends of Abdelkader as saying they were sure he had influenced Mohamed’s actions.
“He was into religion before Mohamed. He taught him everything. I fear he drove him to this,” Le Parisien daily quoted a 30-year-old friend, whom it identified only as Karim, as saying. “In fact I would have sooner imagined him getting into radicalism than Mohamed, who always just seemed like a delinquent kid.”
The weekly Journal du Dimanche reported that Mohamed Merah told police negotiators during the siege that he had felt an “infinite pleasure” at carrying out the attacks.
The paper also cited a former cellmate of Mohamed’s as saying he believed he had been driven to radicalism under the influence of his brother, who he said brought him audio CDs on prison visits that appeared to promote fundamentalist violence.
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.
DCRI chief Bernard Squarcini told Le Monde newspaper on Friday there was no evidence Mohamed belonged to any radical Islamist network and he appeared to have turned fanatic alone.
Abdelkader was known to have studied the Qur'an in Egypt in 2010 and French police had in the past found links between the brothers and a radical Islamist group based in southern France led by a Syrian-born Frenchman dubbed “The White Emir” by French media because of his fair hair and beard.
French intelligence services were aware before the killings that Mohamed had made several trips abroad, including to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Islamic militants in Pakistan said on Sunday that Mohamed Merah had done a stint of training with a Pakistani Taleban faction at a camp near the border with Afghanistan.
“Mohamed Merah trained with the Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP) in North Waziristan,” Ahmed Marwat, who identified himself as a spokesman for the TTP’s Jandola faction, told Reuters.
A Colt 45 pistol found in a Renault car has been formally identified as Merah’s murder weapon.
Marches in memory of Merah’s victims were held on Sunday in Toulouse, Lyon, Strasbourg and Paris.
