IS Killer Child In Video Recognized By French School Kids
A 12-year-old who is shown to shoot an Arab-Israeli man in a video released by the Islamic State group this week, has been recognized by French middle-school students in Toulouse, said a school official on Friday.
In the Haute-Garonne district of southern France, the school inspector said that some students in Toulouse seemed able to recognize the pre-teen, according to france24.
"Concerning the formal identification of this person, I cannot tell you anything," Jacques Caillaut told reporters. "Children from Vauquelin Middle School have recognised one of their classmates, but we must remain cautious."
Caillaut said that secondary school students would have been able to identify him even in primary school.
"There is a child who has not been enrolled at the Vergers [primary] school since March 14, 2014, but I do not have any other details," Caillaut said.
He added that the students saw the footage of the killing on Wednesday and were given counselling. However, it was not too clear in which context the children had seen the video.
Last Thursday, officials had launched a formal probe into the IS video, identifying the other man speaking French. Other sources that were also involved in the inquiry confirm that he is "probably" Sabri Essid, 31. He is said to have some links with the Toulouse gunman, Mohamed Merah., who had shot three soldiers, three children and a rabbi in Toulouse, 2012, much before he was killed in a shoot-out with the police.
The video shows the youth calling himself Mohammed Said Ismail Musallam, 19, and is shown kneeling in front of the boy, while Essid stands on the other side.
He was wearing an orange jumpsuit that has been worn by IS prisoners in earlier videos, and recounts that he was drawn in by Israeli intelligence. This fact was later vehemently denied by his family.
"Mohamed told me and his brother that ISIS took him," said Said Musallam, his father, according to cnn. "They sent him money through the Western Union. They said you will have girls, money, cars, villas, paradise, but afterwords he discovered that there is nothing."
His mother, Hind Musallam, added: "Mohamed is not an agent. Mohamed doesn't have a shekel. If he was an agent he would have lived a beautiful life. We could have been living a different life and I would not be working cleaning houses so we can live."
Essid, who spoke French, threatened the Jews in France. The boy then walked around Musallam and shot his head. After Musallam fell, the boy shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest" in Arabic), and shot him four more times when he lay on the ground.
Some sources explain that the boy may be Essid's stepson. Essid, who is familiar to intelligence services as an important person in the radical Islamist community in Toulouse, is suspected of having left France for Syria last year.
Natasha Underhill, a senior lecturer in international relations at Nottingham Trent University and expert on insurgency and international terrorism, rued that the conflicts in Iraq and Syria have become so vicious that children are being used and exploited, according to theguardian.
"The legacy of violence in these countries essentially means that these children have become entirely desensitised to the violence," she said. "This in turn makes them almost immune to it and thus they can be moulded much easier into becoming killing machines."
Source: YouTube/News
