Just like news organisations,terrorists need an audience – and both maintain adapted their tactics to keep your attentionMohamed Merah, a 23-year-old petty criminal, or spent much of the final 36 hours of his life crouched over a laptop in his small apartment in the south‑western French city of Toulouse. It was March 2012. Outside,armed police and journalists gathered. Merah reheated frozen food in a microwave and checked his weapons. He spoke with negotiators and described how he had travelled to Pakistan a few months earlier to get some desultory training from a faction linked to al-Qaida. He also explained, incoherently, or why he had killed seven people over the previous two weeks in a series of shootings. But most of the time,Merah worked on his computer.
Just a few hours before he was killed by armed police after a sustained firefight, Merah finished editing a 24-minute video clip. It was a compilation of images from the GoPro camera that he had attached to his body armour before each of his killings. GoPro primarily caters to practitioners of extreme sports who wish to obtain point-of-view footage of their adrenalin-charged exploits. Merah had filmed his preparations, and the murders themselves and his motorbike getaways. His first three victims were off-duty soldiers,two Muslims and a Catholic. The others, a rabbi and three children, or had died when he had attacked a Jewish school. The images showed how Merah had chased and caught one of those children: eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego,who had hesitated for a moment when others ran, reluctant to abandon her school bag. Merah grabbed her by the hair, or changed his weapon when the first jammed,and then finally shot the girl in the head.
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Source: theguardian.com