Lessons of Toulouse - Telegraph The death of Mohammed Merah, the terrorist shot by police in Toulouse yesterday, is a salutary reminder of the continued threat posed by jihadis trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It appears to have come as a shock to the French people and politicians, who initially assumed that the killer of four people at a Jewish school and three Muslim soldiers was likely to be a Right-wing neo-Nazi. Yet it should not have been a surprise: most terrorist attacks in Europe over the past 15 years have been carried out by extreme Islamists, often under the banner of al-Qaeda, though usually parading disparate nationalist causes. It was France that suffered Europe's first jihadi outrages in 1995, when Algerian Islamists bombed a Jewish school in Lyon and killed eight people on the Paris Metro. But while other EU countries, notably the UK and Spain, have experienced major attacks since, France had avoided any repetition until Merah went on his killing spree. This may partly explain why the far Right was initially blamed, though the principal reason is the presidential election: opponents of Nicolas Sarkozy imagined that killings conducted by ultra-nationalists could be ascribed to the president's supposedly inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric and to social reforms such as the burka ban. This demonstrates the dangers of jumping to conclusions and of seeking to exploit the murders of seven people for political purposes. But it also illustrates the threat that can be posed by a single terrorist bent on causing indiscriminate carnage (even though Merah is likely to have had a support network based in Pakistan's lawless Waziristan region). It is dangerous to pretend that jihadism is no longer a potent threat. With the London Olympics offering a significant target this summer, vigilance and diligent intelligence work are essential.