A Terrorist's Brother—and France—on Trial
PARIS—Shortly after 6 p.m. on Thursday November 2, in a packed, silent courtroom thrumming with emotion and anticipation, France’s highest criminal court found Abdelkader Merah guilty of criminal terrorist conspiracy and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Not to a life sentence, as the public prosecutor had asked, since the court acquitted Merah on charges of complicity. The conspiracy in question was the one carried out by his younger brother, Mohammed, who, in a 10-day spree in March 2012, murdered three French paratroopers, all of North African origin and two of them Muslim, in southwest France, and later, a rabbi and three children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, before being killed by police in a commando raid several days later.
One of the worst targeted attacks on Jews in France since the Second World War and also the first jihadist attack on French soil since the mid-1990s, Mohammed Merah’s rampage was seen as a massive intelligence failure—it came during a turf war between French intelligence services under then-President Nicolas Sarkozy and in an election season. It was also seen as a wake-up call. The attacks marked the beginning of a terrible new season, one that would, alas, blossom in 2015 and 2016 when 239 people died in a series of terrorist attacks in France, some masterminded by other pairs of blood brothers.
As the first big terrorist trial to take place since that new wave of attacks, the Merah trial has been seen here as hugely symbolic, a chance to put a face to a more widespread phenomenon, even an opportunity for national catharsis. The mixed verdict, after a five-week trial that had been intensely covered in the French media, drew a complicated, unsettled response. Distraught families of the victims—Jews and Muslims alike—said it didn’t go far enough; the state prosecutors plan to appeal. The scholar Gilles Kepel, who has been tracking Islamic radicalism in France for decades, that not handing Abdelkader Merah a life sentence would be seen as “a sign of weakness” by jihadists currently serving time in French prisons—which in recent
