Sufficient Reason

Just one of thousands and thousands. One that went berserk. All those thousands upon thousands of second, third generation French-Algerian kids, living in those public 'estates', on public assistance. Some of them, like Mohammed Merah opting out of school, preferring not to complete his education for a more exciting lifestyle.

Didn't take too long before the bored and resentful kid became a juvenile delinquent. There's a lot of juvenile delinquents in the banlieues; the police know them all. They harass and chase after them. Being careful to wear those knife-proof vests. Looking out for drug dealers, petty thieves, gang members, suspects in mass car barbecues.

"I just cannot believe he did all that. He was one of us; he wasn't some religious fanatic. He never even went to the mosque." That's what one of his childhood friends in Toulouse living in the same suburb of Izards as Merah said, wonderingly. That wasn't the carefree, ebullient kid he knew; it was someone else, really strange.

He never even went to mosque, but he did adapt himself to the Salafist ideology, a fundamentalist -based faith that would have been very strange to him if it were not for the fact that it fit so neatly into the even more 'radicalized' notion of violent jihad, the dire necessity to prove your faith by pledging yourself to terror.

Mohammed Merah's mother, Zoulikha who made no effort to dissuade her son from continuing his campaign of resistance to French police, because she asserted she would have no influence on him, says now she is "wracked with guilt", because she was unable to prevent his killing rampage. "She is asking herself whether she could have stopped him" her lawyer helpfully added as she was released from custody.

Does this mean she was aware of his activities and simply stood by? His brother Abdelkader, with his younger brother Mohammed during the initial stages of the siege that kept French special-unit police very busy for a day and a half, claims complete innocence. He had no knowledge, none whatever, of what his brother was up to. Whatever it was, though, he "was very proud of him".

The piety of Salafism appealed to Mohammed who never entered the confines of the local mosque. In prison he invited the opportunity to learn more about retribution and revenge. The French are only now recognizing the threat contained in the prison system where the virus of radicalism spreads like the dread disease it is.

Merah was prepared to become a French Foreign Legion member before he decided he would prefer to kill French military members. Killing French Jews was just a natural. No emotion, no compassion whatever in grabbing children to make them stay still so they could be shot at such close range that powder marks blemished their pale, dead faces.

He wanted to be famous as an admired mujahadeen. That camera strapped to his chest would do it. All the videos he had watched of beheadings wouldn't compare to the ones he was prepared to post himself. The interior minister has a response to questions, more or less:

"The DCRI follows lots of people involved in radical Islam. Expressing ideas, espousing Salafist beliefs is not a sufficient reason to arrest someone."

Wait and watch. Murder gives sufficient reason.