Thread: French police surround Muslim school shooting gunman

French police surround school shooting gunman

By Jean Décotte and John Irish | Reuters – 2 hrs 44 mins ago.. .

TOULOUSE, France (Reuters) - French police in the southwestern city of Toulouse tightened their siege of a gunman suspected of shooting dead seven people, including three Jewish children, in a killing spree in the name of al Qaeda.

In an unfolding drama that has riveted France and the world, about 300 police, some in body armor, cordoned off a four-storey building in a suburb of Toulouse where the 24-year-old Muslim shooter, identified as Mohamed Merah, is holed up.

French Interior Minister Claude Gueant denied media reports that Merah had been arrested. President Nicolas Sarkozy was expected to speak to reporters in Toulouse shortly.

Gueant said the gunman was a French citizen of Algerian origin who had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan and had told police negotiators he had carried out his attacks to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and because of the French army's involvement in Afghanistan.

Authorities in Afghanistan confirmed that Merah had been arrested for bomb making in the lawless southern province of Kandahar in 2007 but escaped months later in a massive Taliban prison break.

Police removed other residents from the building and began evacuating other nearby homes. A police source said that authorities would not allow the siege to drag on indefinitely.

Sarkozy, running for re-election in five weeks time, said earlier that France should not give way to discrimination or vengeance after the shootings of a rabbi and the three children, and three soldiers of North African origin.

His warning came after far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a rival presidential candidate, said France should wage war on Islamic fundamentalism.

"Terrorism will not manage to break our nation's feeling of community," Sarkozy said after meeting Jewish and Muslim community leaders in the Elysee palace in Paris. "We must stand together. We must not cede to discrimination or vengeance."

Interior Minister Gueant said Merah, who had been under surveillance since the attack on the first soldiers last week, wanted revenge "for Palestinian children and he also wanted to attack the French army because of its foreign intervention".

He told journalists Merah was a member of an ideological Islamic group in France but this organization was not involved in plotting any violence.

He said Merah had thrown a Colt 45 pistol of the kind used in all the shootings out of a window of the block of flats in exchange for a mobile phone, but was still armed.

Police sources said they had conducted a controlled explosion of the suspect's car at around 9:00 a.m. after discovering it was loaded with weapons.

Merah's girlfriend and brother, also known to authorities as a radical Islamist, have also been arrested, officials said.

RAID

Gueant said Merah had contacted the first soldier he attacked under the pretext of wanting to buy his motorcycle.

Investigators identified the IP address he used - that of his mother - because he was already under surveillance for radical Islamist beliefs.

"We knew, and that is why he was under surveillance, that he had travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan," the minister said.

The telephone of the man and his family was tapped from Monday and with the help of other information the police decided to raid his house. Merah has a criminal record in France, Gueant said, but nothing indicating such an attack was possible.

A police source told Reuters that investigators had also received a tipoff from a scooter repair shop in Toulouse where the gunman asked to change the color of the Yamaha scooter used to flee the shootings and to remove a GPS tracker device.

A group of young men from Merah's neighborhood described him as a polite man of slight build who liked football and motorbikes and did not seem particularly religious.

"He isn't the big bearded guy that you can imagine, you know the cliché," said Kamal, who declined to give his family name. "When you know a person well you just can't believe they could have done something like this."

Sarkozy had been informed of the standoff early in the morning, officials said. The president's handling of the crisis could be a decisive factor in determining how the French people vote in the two-round presidential elections in April and May.

The Jewish victims from the Ozar Hatorah school were buried in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Parliament speaker Reuben Rivlin said in his eulogy at the hill-top cemetery that the attack was inspired by "wild animals with hatred in their hearts".

Authorities said on Tuesday that the gunman had apparently filmed his rampage through the school. He wounded Rabbi Jonathan Sandler as he entered the building, then shot an 8-year-old girl in the head, before returning to kill Sandler and his two children, who had rushed to his side, at point blank range.

Immigrants and Islam have been major themes of the campaign after Sarkozy tried to win over the voters of Le Pen, who accused the government on Wednesday of underestimating the threat from fundamentalism.

"We must now wage this war against these fundamentalist political and religious groups that are killing our children, that are killing our Christian children, our Christian young men, young Muslim men and Jewish children," she told the i-Tele news channel, questioning the decision to deploy in Afghanistan.

But leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities said the gunman was a lone extremist.

France's military presence in Afghanistan has divided the two main candidates in the election. Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande has said he will pull them out by the end of this year while Sarkozy aims for the end of 2013.

Jean Marc, a 56-year-old restaurant owner in the city who declined to give his last name, said he believed the crisis would benefit the far right or Sarkozy in the election.

"The Socialists don't talk about this stuff and it shows they don't know what they are doing," he said. "They (the police) need to get this guy."

French police surround school shooting gunman - Yahoo! News

French slaying suspect had criminal past in Afghanistan, official says

March 21, 2012 | 9:49am

REPORTING FROM PARIS -- As French police remain locked in a standoff with a man wanted in connection with the shooting deaths of seven people, including soldiers and Jewish schoolchildren, new information emerged about the suspected killer.

Police identified the suspect to several news agencies as Mohammed Merah, a French national of Algerian origin who claimed to be a member of a group linked to Al Qaeda.

Merah reportedly had a criminal history in Afghanistan. Five years ago, he was sentenced to three years behind bars for planting bombs in the province of Kandahar but escaped months later in a Taliban prison break, an Afghan prison director told Reuters news service.

[Updated at 10:15 a.m. March 21: However, the Telegraph in London reports that the Afghan government has denied ever detaining a French citizen named Mohammed Merah, casting doubt on the prison director's claims.]

French prosecutor Francois Molins said the suspect is believed to have been to Afghanistan twice and had trained in the militant stronghold of Waziristan in Pakistan, the Associated Press reported.

The French government said Merah had been under surveillance by security services, and Christian Etelin, an attorney who represented Merah on charges of driving without a license last month, said his client knew he was being watched since his return from Afghanistan.


Interior Minister Claude Guéant said the suspect claimed he had killed students at a Jewish school Monday to "avenge" the deaths of Palestinian children. He also reportedly confessed to killing three soldiers in drive-by attacks because of French military intervention in Afghanistan.

"His radicalization took place in a Salafist ideological group and seems to have been firmed up by two journeys he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan," Guéant said.

Though authorities believe that Merah is a Muslim fundamentalist, two of the three slain soldiers were Muslims and all three were of North African origin, which had fueled earlier suspicions that the killer was targeting French minorities.

However, Guéant said the suspect told them that the soldiers' ethnicities had nothing to do with his actions, the Associated Press reported.

Etelin described Merah as "by no means rigid or fanatical" and said he could not imagine him committing the shootings.

"He was polite and courteous ... quite sweet actually," the attorney said.

French slaying suspect had criminal past in Afghanistan, official says - latimes.com

March 22, 2012

French Shooting Suspect Dies in Firefight With Police

Lisa Bryant | Paris

France's Interior Minister Claude Gueant arrives to speak to the media after the assault to capture gunman Mohamed Merah during a raid on a five-story building to arrest a suspect in the killings of three children and a rabbi on Monday at a Jewish school, in Toulouse March 22, 2012.

French authorities are investigating whether a suspect in a string of shootings that killed seven people in southwestern France had any accomplices. The suspected killer, Mohammed Merah, died Thursday after a firefight with French police in the city of Toulouse.

The last minutes of the Toulouse drama took place on the national stage - with live accounts of the firefight between French police and suspect Mohammed Merah. Authorities say the gunman, 23 kept shooting as he threw himself from the window of the apartment where he had been holed up for hours. A Paris prosecutor says police shot him in the head and he was found dead on the ground.

Closure

Merah's death brings closure to more than a week of killings in the Toulouse area - first targeting French paratroopers and then Jewish children and a rabbi. French authorities say the suspect acted methodically, at one point chasing an eight-year-old girl into a school courtyard before shooting her dead. Authorities linked the same weapon to all the shootings carried out by a man on a motorcycle.

In an address to the nation shortly after the firefight, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for healing and unity.

Sarkozy said the French must overcome their indignation and control their anger. He said French Muslims had nothing to do with the crazy motivations of a terrorist, noting the assailant had also shot Muslims.

Trained by al-Qaida

Barricaded in the Toulouse apartment for hours, Merah told police he received training from al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He killed his victims, he said, to retaliate for France's military involvement in Afghanistan -- and to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.

Sarkozy announced penal measures against those receiving terrorist training overseas or consulting Internet sites espousing hatred and terrorism. He called for new scrutiny of French prisons to prevent them from becoming places of extremist indoctrination.

Members of France's Jewish and Muslim communities are staging a joint march on Sunday in memory of the Toulouse victims.

Healing process

In a joint interview on France's RTL radio with France's chief rabbi, Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Muslim Council, said it is important for France not to mix Islam with terrorism. He said he is relieved the drama is over.

The killings have cut to the heart of a presidential campaign in which immigration and Islam have been hotly debated. Sarkozy's handling of the events have clearly helped him in the polls. A new survey puts him two points ahead of his main Socialist challenger, just a month before presidential elections.

French Shooting Suspect Dies in Firefight With Police | Europe | English

Toulouse gunman killed by sniper

The siege came to an end Thursday morning The siege came to an end on Thursday morning

French newspapers are divided over the political lessons to be learned from the Toulouse gunman Mohammed Merah.

Some want politicians to insist on tolerance of diversity while others urge an "intransigent" stance on the integration of minorities.

Many papers also take an interest in the life of the 23-year-old suspect, with front-page headlines such as "Trajectory of hatred" (Liberation), "Itinerary of a killer" (Le Parisien) and "End of the road for a killer" (L'Humanite).

Le Parisien has a photo of a smiling Merah splashed over most of its front page.

"We must be intransigent"

A front-page editorial by Paul-Henri du Limbert in the centre-right Le Figaro says the killings show that President Nicolas Sarkozy and his interior minister have been right to adopt a hard line on Islamic "sectarianism".

"If we want to avoid a repetition of the terrible tragedy of Toulouse, we must be intransigent," the paper says. "That is what Nicolas Sarkozy and Claude Gueant are, despite the accusations of 'stigmatisation' that have been levelled at them by the left for years as soon as they talk about immigration, integration or citizenship," it adds. The left, by contrast, is guilty of a "denial of reality".

The centre-left Le Monde draws the opposite conclusion. According to the paper, it is precisely the goal of jihadists like Merah to "prevent France from being France and Europe from being Europe in their diversity and their tradition of tolerance". "Today the worst mistake... would be to give in to this pressure at a time of grief and in the face of threats," the daily says in a front-page editorial.

The centre-left Liberation takes a similar line. An editorial by Nicolas Demorand praises President Sarkozy for his "dignified and moving" account of the lives of the three soldiers killed, which it says reflect the diversity of modern France. But "why wait for such a massacre to utter those simple words?" it asks. "Certain words, certain speeches should disappear from public life once and for all," it adds, while urging politicians to reject "the poison of populist one-upmanship".

Sarkozy "the winner"

Several commentators in the regional press regard Mr Sarkozy as the main beneficiary in the presidential election campaign just a month before the first round.

Philippe Waucampt in Le Republicain Lorrain says the speed of his response and the police's swift identification of the suspect mean that the president is "the great winner in this difficult situation". "We have thus every reason to believe that his popularity ratings will soar and that voting intentions in his favour will continue to go up," the paper says.

Writing in Sud Ouest, Bruno Dive agrees that Mr Sarkozy can be expected to benefit, but he adds that "nothing is decided", all the more since his Socialist rival Francois Hollande "has also shown tact and dignity". He adds that the suspect's profile may also play into the hands of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

Philippe Marcacci in L'Est Republicain believes the debate has been focused again on "issues which have haunted all recent elections: law and order and the Islamisation of society".

But a commentary by Dominique Quinio in the Catholic daily La Croix warns against even analysing who will benefit politically from the shootings. "The very idea is odious, indecent," says the paper, which asks how such words would be received by the families of those killed. "Dignity, respect, calm, solidarity, that is the tribute we owe them," it says.

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BBC News - French press split on lessons of Mohammed Merah