The report by Claire Lagadic, a journalist for the newspaper La Dépêche, is revealing. Among other things, she reports that Fettah Malki, the man who armed Mohamed Merah, is still in the Izards neighbourhood in Toulouse. The 38-year-old had failed to comply with his judicial control and was arrested on Wednesday evening by police officers from the department’s security service, the newspaper reports. The man, who was always believed to be the third man involved in the 2012 Toulouse attacks that killed seven people, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in a special court in Paris in 2017 alongside Abdelkader Merah, the brother of the killer with the scooter. On appeal, he was sentenced again in 2019, this time to 10 years in prison.
Thanks to the hard-fought decision by his lawyers that the crimes he was accused of were not classified as terrorist, Fettah Malki was able to benefit from sentence reductions. Thus, he was released from prison unnoticed at the end of August this year. However, the French state was determined not to allow Merah’s arms dealer to remain free on its territory and decided to initiate deportation proceedings against the man with dual French-Algerian citizenship. So, after leaving the detention centre in Muret, Fettah Malki headed towards the administrative deportation centre in Cornebarrieu, where he was waiting to be deported to Algeria. Except that at the same time, the diplomatic crisis between Paris and Algiers over the visa issue was escalating. France was angered by the low percentage of enforced deportation orders from France (OQTF) and had then decided to “tighten” the conditions for persons subject to deportation from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia ,.
While Fettah Malki was housed in a reception centre, his visa was refused twice. So after one and a half months in Cornebarrieu, as required by law, he was released. So he ended up in Toulouse, where he was under judicial supervision. At the end of his police custody, he was brought before the public prosecutor’s office and is to be charged on Friday in the Toulouse criminal court under the immediate trial procedure. In 2012, Mohamed Merah had killed seven people, including three children, in cold blood in three attacks in Toulouse and Montauban, La Dépêche reported. Fettah Malki had always assured that he had known nothing about the terrorist intentions of the killer with the motor scooter. He had provided him with the gun and the bulletproof vest.