Simon Says

Paris (CNN) -- Al Jazeera's Paris bureau received video of the shootings in southwest France blamed on Mohammed Merah, and gave the material to the police, bureau chief Zied Tarrouche said Tuesday.

The video arrived by mail on Monday on a USB stick along with an unsigned letter crediting al Qaeda with the attacks, he said.

The memory stick contained two clips with a total of 25 minutes of material, Tarrouche said.

Al Jazeera kept a copy when police took the original, but has not decided whether to air the footage, he said.

Mohammed Merah, 23, was killed Thursday at the end of a 32-hour siege of the apartment in the city of Toulouse where he was holed up.

He was wanted in the killings of three French paratroopers, a rabbi and three children ages 4, 5, and 7. Two other people were seriously wounded in shootings blamed on him.

The Israeli government confirmed Tuesday that Merah had visited Israel and the West Bank for three days in September 2010, but did not offer details about what he did there.

He crossed from Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, where he underwent procedural questioning by Israel's internal security service known as the Shin Bet, and was allowed to enter, government spokesman Mark Regev said.

On Sunday, police charged Merah's brother, Abdelkader, with complicity in seven murders and two attempted murders and took him into custody, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

Authorities also charged the brother with conspiracy to prepare acts of terrorism and group theft, the prosecutor's office said.

But he feels he is being made a scapegoat for the crimes Merah is accused of, his lawyer Anne-Sophie Laguens said.

He feels Merah's acts were "reprehensible," Laguens said on CNN affiliate BFM-TV, adding: "The impression we are getting today is that because we weren't able to put his brother on trial because he is no longer with us then maybe we are coming down on the only person that is present."

Police also questioned Mohammed Merah's mother and his brother's girlfriend, but have released them without charge, the Paris prosecutor said.

Police tracked Mohammed Merah down via his mother's computer IP address, which was apparently used to respond to an ad posted by the first shooting victim, officials said.

Questions have been raised as to why Merah -- a petty criminal who was placed under surveillance by French authorities after visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan -- was not being more closely watched.

He claimed to have attended an al Qaeda training camp, according to Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, and was on the U.S. no-fly list for that reason, a U.S. intelligence official said.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon told French radio station RTL that "there was no single element" that would have allowed the police to arrest Merah before the killings began.

He was tracked down by police 10 days after the first shooting on March 11.

In that attack, Imad Ibn Ziaten, a paratrooper of North African origin, arranged to meet a man in Toulouse who wanted to buy a scooter Ziaten had advertised online, the interior minister said. The victim said in the ad that he was in the military.

Four days later, two other soldiers were shot dead and another injured by a black-clad man wearing a motorcycle helmet in a shopping center in the city of Montauban, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Toulouse.

In the third attack at the private Jewish school Ozar Hatorah on March 19, a man wearing a motorcycle helmet and driving a motor scooter pulled up and shot a teacher and three children -- two of them the teacher's young sons -- in the head. The other victim, the daughter of the school's director, was killed in front of her father.

Police said the same guns were used in all three attacks.