Brother of Toulouse gunman faces charges

The brother of the gunman who admitted to shooting dead seven people in and around the French city of Toulouse was set to be brought before a judge in Paris on Sunday after his four-day detention period ran out, French media reported.

Abdelkader Merah, the older brother of Mohamed Merah, is being investigated for links to the three attacks for which his brother, who was killed by police in a raid Thursday, claimed responsibility, dpa reported.

Le Parisien daily said he faced charges for complicity in murder or for criminal conspiracy in a terrorist venture.

Although Mohamed Merah insisted he had acted alone, Le Parisien quoted police sources as saying his brother's mobile phone had been located near the Jewish school at the time of last Monday's attack, in which Merah shot dead a rabbi and three children.

The paper also reported that the two had dined at length together on the eve of the attack.

Abdelkader Merah has also admitted to being present when his brother stole the scooter he used in his execution-style attacks, investigators told several French media.

His wife, who was detained with him on Wednesday in Toulouse and was also brought to Paris, was released without charge Saturday night, her lawyer Guy Debuisson said.

The lawyer told BFM TV she knew nothing of the "double life" of her husband, who was investigated in 2007 for links to a group that arranged for would-be French jihadists to travel to Iraq.

Meanwhile, Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper quoted Mohamed Merah as telling police during their 32-hour siege of his apartment that he regretted not having killed more children at the Jewish school.

Mohamed Merah, who claimed links to al-Qaeda, also told police he had handed the footage of his killings to his Muslim "brothers" to be uploaded on the internet, the paper reported.

The 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin said he did not want to be a suicide bomber, because he preferred "to see his victims", to "touch" them. He was also quoted as saying that the Jewish school was a backup target after he had failed to find a paratrooper to kill that morning.

The three victims of his first two attacks in Toulouse and the nearby town of Montauban were paratroopers.

Merah said the North African origins of two of the paratroopers' was not a factor in those attacks.

He also told police he had undergone one-on-one terrorism training in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, where he spent two months in 2011, and that his instructor had wanted him to carry out attacks in Paris.

Investigators, who describe the gunman, who had a history of delinquency, as a "narcissistic", self-aggrandizing individual, were treating those claims with caution.