Meet Mohammed Merah - The face of a Jihadi lone wolf.

Meet Mohammed Merah - The face of a Jihadi lone wolf.(Calgaryherald).As police psychologists tried to talk him into surrendering peacefully, Merah gave the same impression of calm determination and self-control as the gunman on a scooter recorded by security cameras at the Ozer Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday."With the RAID negotiators, he explained a lot about his itinerary," Gueant said.Exactly when and how Merah slid from petty crime to Islamist radicalism remains unclear."His radicalization took place in a Salafist ideological group and seems to have been firmed up by two journeys he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan," the interior minister said
During the first of those trips, Merah was picked up by chance at a road check by local police in Kandahar and handed over to the U.S. army, which put him on a flight back to France, according to Francois Molins, the public prosecutor in charge of the case.
A French security source said that was in 2010 after Merah had spent about a year in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. The gunman said he had undergone military training with al-Qaida in the Pakistani province of Waziristan, Molins told reporters.
U.S. officials declined comment on any role in handling Merah in Afghanistan but said they believed he was probably not affiliated with what remains of the core al-Qaida organization created by the late Osama bin Laden and led now by Ayman al Zawahiri.
Instead, they believe he is probably a lone wolf, or almost-lone-wolf, with at most a handful of associates including perhaps his brother.
Molins said Merah's elder brother, Abdelkader, 29, who is being questioned by investigators, was known to the security services for having helped smuggle Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007. Police found explosives in a car owned by Abdelkader, the prosecutor said.
Molins said Mohamed Merah made his own way to Afghanistan without using networks of facilitators under surveillance by Western intelligence. His second Afghan stay in 2011 was cut short after three months when he contracted hepatitis A and returned to France in mid-October, the prosecutor said.
The daily Le Monde said Merah had trained with Pakistani Taliban fighters in a border tribal zone before being sent into southwestern Afghanistan to fight against NATO forces supporting the Kabul government.French troops are part of that NATO operation, which may explain why the first victims of the gunman's killing spree were serving paratroopers killed in Toulouse on March 11 and Montauban on March 15.
French intelligence sources said about 30 French fighters trained by the Taliban were believed to have taken part in attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan.Hmmmm......Read the full story here.