Merah

PARIS — France’s prime minister fended off suggestions today that antiterrorism authorities fell down on the job in monitoring a radical Islamist who gunned down children, paratroopers and a rabbi in a wave of killings that revolted the country.

Investigators were questioning Mohamed Merah’s brother as they search for possible accomplices in his close-range killings of seven people since March 11.

Merah, who claimed allegiance to al-Qaida and had spent time in prison, died Thursday during a gunfight with police following a 32-hour standoff outside his apartment in Toulouse. He was a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin.

French intelligence services had been aware of Merah’s trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan’s militant stronghold of Waziristan in recent years, and he had been on a U.S. no-fly list since 2010.

Some politicians, French media and Toulouse residents questioned why authorities didn’t stop him before March 11, when he committed the first of three deadly shooting attacks.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told RTL radio today that authorities “at no moment” suspected Merah would be dangerous despite a long criminal record.

“The fact of belonging to a Salafist (ultraconservative Muslim) organization is not unto itself a crime,” Fillon said.

Three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers died in France’s worst Islamist terrorist violence since a wave of attacks in the 1990s by Algerian extremists. Merah told negotiators he killed them to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan as well as France’ law against the Islamic face veil.

Fillon said President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government is working on new antiterrorism legislation that would be drafted within two weeks.