Morocco asks why France didn't flag up supermarket attacker

The head of Morocco's counterterrorism agency said yesterday that France should have alerted his country about the extremist behaviour of the French-Moroccan gunman who carried out a deadly supermarket attack in southern France.

While French authorities had monitored Radouane Lakdim before his rampage Friday and normally share information about radicalised dual nationals, "We were not notified about Lakdim's radical background," Abdelhak Khiame, director of Morocco's Central Bureau of Judicial Investigations, told The Associated Press.

He spoke as French authorities filed preliminary terrorism charges against the attacker's girlfriend an 18-year-old convert to Islam who was also on a French watch list for radicalism.

Khiame is not the only one asking what went wrong ahead of Friday's attack, which killed four people. French media and opposition politicians have questioned how authorities let Lakdim slip through their net, after a string of attacks in recent years involving young men already on police radar.

Khiame called the absence of communication with France, a close Moroccan ally, an apparent "misunderstanding."

"His country of birth should have been notified that its national is wanted by French security," Khiame said in his bureau's headquarters in Sale, near Morocco's capital, Rabat. Lakdim was born in Morocco in 1992 but went soon afterward to France with his family, and became a French citizen in 2004.

French officials did not immediately respond to Khiame's concerns.