Mohamed Merah, the gunman who killed seven people including three Jewish children, may have been an informant for France's intelligence services, according to reports that raise further questions about whether authorities missed chances to prevent the attacks.

The 23-year-old, who is a French citizen of Algerian origin, shot dead three Muslim soldiers as well as three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school before being slain by police commandos at the end of a 32-hour standoff in an apartment in Toulouse.

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It later emerged Merah had traveled to Afghanistan and Israel in 2010 and had been interviewed in November 2011 by the domestic intelligence agency Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI).

Bernard Squarcini, head of the agency, was quoted by French newspaper Le Monde as saying Merah asked for a local DCRI agent by name while he was holed-up in the apartment surrounded by police.

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Squarcini told Le Monde that Merah shocked the female agent by saying: "Anyway, I was going to call you to say I had some tip-offs for you, but actually I was going to [kill] you.”

Merah, who told police he had been inspired to commit his attacks by al-Qaida, used the French word "fumer", which means "to smoke," which is a slang term that also means to "murder" or "waste."

Squarcini’s remarks to Le Monde were reported in other French media, including Liberation and Le Figaro.

 

'Not trivial'
Yves Bonnet, former head of an intelligence agency that was merged with DCRI in 2008, told Toulouse newspaper La Dépêche du Midi that it was significant that Merah appeared to have a regular contact at the DCRI. “Having a contact is not totally innocent,” he told the newspaper. “This is not trivial.”

Italian newspaper Il Foglio said Merah’s trip to Israel and Afghanistan in September 2010 was made with the knowledge of the French foreign secret service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. However, London's Independent newspaper quoted a spokesman for the agency as dismissing that report as "grotesque".

Squarcini has since insisted Merah was not helping authorities, telling Liberation the gunman was not "an informer for the DCRI or any other French or foreign services."

Meanwhile, Merah’s body will be flown to Algeria on Thursday if the country agrees to receive it, an official at one of the biggest mosques in Paris told Reuters.

Abdallah Zekri said Merah's body was being kept at a hospital in Toulouse while Algerian authorities decided whether they were willing to receive it. French media had reported that Merah's father had requested burial in Algeria.

On Tuesday, Merah's father, Mohamed Benalen Merah, lashed out at French authorities for killing his son. The elder Merah, who lives in Algeria, had earlier said he wanted to sue France.

"France is a powerful country with huge resources," Merah told France 24 television. "They could have taken him while he slept. They could have used a sleep-inducing gas and taken him like a baby. Why were they so hasty? Why did they kill him?"

"They could have arrested him and had him face justice," he added.

However, the BBC said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe responded: "If I were the father of such a monster, I would shut my mouth in shame.”

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Updated at 8:54 a.m. ET: Qatar-based news channel al-Jazeera has pledged not to air footage of the killings carried out in France by an al-Qaida-inspired gunman after President Nicolas Sarkozy pleaded with broadcasters not to show the disturbing scenes.

France is still coming to terms with Mohamed Merah's close-range shootings of three Jewish children, a rabbi and three soldiers in the south of the country.

The killings were filmed by Merah using a camera attached to his body, BBC News reported.

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"I call on executives of all TV stations that may have the images in their possession not to broadcast them under any pretext out of respect for the victims and for France," Sarkozy said following a meeting with police chiefs in Paris.

Al-Jazeera, which received a memory stick containing the footage, later announced it would not broadcast the video because it "did not add any information that was not already in public domain" and also "did not meet the television station's code of ethics for broadcast."

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Zied Tarrouche, al-Jazeera's bureau chief in Paris, told French chanel BFM TV he had watched the video and it showed all of the killing.

"You see all of the attacks carried out in Toulouse and Montauban, that's to say the murder of the first soldier, then the three soldiers and finally the attack on the school," he was quoted as telling the channel in a BBC report.

"You hear the voice of the person who carried out the killings," he added. "You also hear the victims' cries. My feelings are those of any human being who sees horrible things."

The BBC said Mr Tarrouche told the channel the video also contained a mixture of religious songs, readings and Koranic verses.

The package sent to al-Jazeera was dated Wednesday, March 21 - the day that police surrounded Merah in his apartment in the city of Toulouse after a massive manhunt, according to a report in the Parisien daily newspaper.

French special forces shot the young Islamist the following day after a 30-hour siege.

"Investigators are trying to find out whether the letter was posted Tuesday night by Mohamed Merah himself or by an accomplice Wednesday morning," the newspaper wrote.

The Paris prosecutor in charge of the case said last week that the Merah had filmed each of the shootings.

The killings, and subsequent calls for tougher measures to monitor Islamic extremism, come a month before the French presidential election.

NBC News, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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PARIS -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy's spy chief says a gunman who killed three young children and a rabbi at a Jewish school only attacked the school after missing his original target -- a French soldier.

Ange Mancini, Sarkozy's intelligence adviser, said on French TV that Mohamed Merah had wanted to kill a soldier he had targeted Monday in Toulouse, but arrived too late and instead besieged a nearby Jewish school.

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Mancini told France-24 TV on Friday that "it wasn't the school that he wanted to attack," calling the school shooting "opportunistic."

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Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, was killed Thursday in a shootout after police raided the Toulouse apartment
where he had been holed up for 32 hours in a standoff with authorities.

Also on Friday, the country's s prime minister rejected accusations that intelligence lapses allowed Merah, a man with a violent criminal record who had been spotted twice in Afghanistan, to become the first al-Qaida-inspired killer to strike on its soil.

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Merah shot dead three Jewish children and four adults in three separate attacks despite having been under surveillance by the DCRI domestic intelligence agency, which questioned him as recently as November.

Hardened by battling Islamic militants from its former North African colony of Algeria, the French security services have long been regarded as among the most effective in Europe, having prevented militant attacks on French soil for the last 15 years.

Negligence?
Opposition politicians, including far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, suggested that negligence or errors had permitted Merah to carry out three deadly shootings within 10 days before he was identified, located and killed.

But Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the police and intelligence agencies had done an exemplary job.

"Resolving a criminal case of this importance in 10 days, I believe that's practically unprecedented in the history of our country," Fillon told RTL radio.

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Merah amassed a cache of at least eight guns under the noses of French intelligence, including several Colt .45 pistols of the kind he used in the shootings, but also at least one Uzi submachine gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppe had appeared to acknowledge on Thursday that there were grounds to question possible security flaws, saying: "We need to bring some clarity to this."

"Since the DCRI was following Mohamed Merah for a year, how come they took so long to locate him?" Socialist party security spokesman Francois Rebsamen asked on the JDD.fr website.

Merah's elder brother Abdelkader, 29, who is now under police questioning, was also on a security watch list after being linked with the smuggling of Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007, government officials said.

The left-leaning daily Liberation asked in an editorial whether the intelligence services had not "failed miserably."

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"How could they have so underestimated the potential danger of an individual they already knew?"

In Washington, two U.S. officials said Merah was on a U.S. government "no fly" list, barring him from boarding any U.S.-bound aircraft. The officials said that his name had been on the list for some time.

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The officials said the entry included sufficient biometric detail to make clear the man on the blacklist was the same person involved in the Toulouse shootings. He was put on the list because U.S. officials deemed him a potential threat to aviation, one of the officials said.

Rebsamen said that after the shooting of two paratroopers in Montauban, near Toulouse, on March 15, Merah's name was on top of a DCRI list of 20 people to be particularly closely watched in the southwestern Mid-Pyrenees region. Yet the agency appeared to have lost his trace.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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