Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Toulouse Killer Raised To Be Anti-Semitic: Brother

Abdelghani Merah has written in a book that his brother, Mohamed, was raised to be an anti-Semite long before he killed four Jews in Toulouse.

“My young brother was certainly a Salafist, but before he turned into one he grew up in this detestable atmosphere that accommodates anti-Semitism,” Abdelghani Merah reportedly has written in a new book about his brother set to appear this week.

Mohammed Merah gunned down three children and a rabbi on March 19 at a Jewish school. In a series of attacks that he committed earlier that month, he killed three French soldiers. A police marksman killed Merah during a police raid on Merah’s home, as Merah tried to jump out of the bathroom window.

The Merahs grew up with a “cultural anti-Semitism” and “despised the Jews,” Abdelghani Merah wrote in his book, according to a report in the French magazine Le Point.

Souad and Kader Merah, two siblings of Mohammed and Abdelghani Merah, “hated the infidels and particularly the Jews, without any distinctions,” Abdelghani Merah reportedly wrote.

Merah and his brother spent their summer vacations in Algeria, their parents’ land of origin. “The vast majority of our paternal family were supporters of FIs and GIA,” two militant Islamist groups.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.