'Terminated' jihadi Mohammed Merah had visited Israel.

'Terminated' jihadi Mohammed Merah had visited Israel.(JPost).French gunman Mohamed Merah, who killed three soldiers and four Jews in France in the last two weeks, had been on a trip to Israel in the past, France's Le Monde newspaper reported Thursday.According to the report, Merah's passport had Israeli stamps in it. The purpose of his visit is not known, but analysts suspect he was either trying to visit the Palestinian territories or do reconnaissance to plan a terror attack
The Jerusalem Post could not confirm the veracity of this report.
Based on the stamps in his passports, Merah also visited Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Afghanistan.
The 23-year-old gunman who said al-Qaida inspired him to kill seven people in France died from a gunshot wound to the head on Thursday as he scrambled out of a ground-floor window during a gunbattle with elite police commandos.
Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, died in a hail of bullets at the end of a 30-hour standoff with police at his apartment in southern France and after confessing to killing three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi.
He was firing frantically at police from a Colt 45 pistol as he climbed through his apartment window onto a verandah and toppled to the ground some 5 feet (1.5 meters) below, in a suburb of the city of Toulouse, according to prosecutors and police.
Two police commandos were injured in the operation - a dramatic climax to a siege which riveted the world after the killings shook France a month before a presidential election.
"At the moment when a video probe was sent into the bathroom, the killer came out of the bathroom, firing with extreme violence," Interior Minister Claude Gueant told reporters at the scene.
"In the end, Mohamed Merah jumped from the window with his gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground."
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Merah had taken refuge in his bathroom, wearing a bullet-proof vest under his traditional black djellaba robe, as elite police blasted his flat through the night with flash grenades.
Police investigators were working to establish whether Merah had worked alone or with accomplices, Molins said, adding that Merah had filmed his three shooting attacks with a camera hung from his body and had indicated that he had posted clips online.
The most disturbing image of the attacks showed him grabbing a young girl at a Jewish school on Monday by the hair and shooting her in the head before escaping on a scooter.
The killings have raised questions about whether there were intelligence failures, what the attacks mean for social cohesion and race relations in France and how the aftermath will affect President Nicolas Sarkozy's slim chances of re-election.
Sarkozy called Merah's killings terrorist attacks and announced a crackdown on people following extremist websites."From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished," he said in a statement. "France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil."Hmmmm.........72 'surgeons' couldn't help him now.Read the full story here.


Updated :
Mohammed Merah, the terrorist who murdered seven people, including a rabbi and three young children, and who was killed by French security forces in Toulouse, visited Israel several years ago, it was reported Thursday.
Channel 10 News reported that the reason for Merah’s visit to Israel is not entirely clear, but it is believed he came to gather intelligence for his attack.
The Channel 10 report was based on a comment made by an American officer serving in Afghanistan to the French newspaper Le Monde. The officer told the newspaper that Merah’s passport had been stamped with entry to and exit from Israel.
However, the National Immigration Authority said on Thursday evening that an initial investigation found that Merah never visited Israel. Kol Yisrael radio reported that the National Immigration Authority said that the terrorist's name, as published in the media, was not found in the list of arrivals to Israel. The authority added that it is continuing to investigate the matter.
Channel 10 noted that there are conflicting reports about whether Merah was identified as an Al-Qaeda activist before 2010, which is when he allegedly visited Israel. The report noted that if he was indeed suspected to be an Al-Qaeda terrorist, then Israeli procedure would have called for him to be interrogated at the airport and to undergo a thorough security check.
It is unknown whether Merah was indeed interrogated or checked, the report said. The Israel Security Agency refused to comment on the issue and said that it was still being review reviewed.Source INN.