NEWS,21.03.2012.

Gunman boasted he brought France to its knees

A besieged gunman suspected of shooting dead seven people in the name of al Qaeda boasted to police on Wednesday he had brought France to its knees. He said his only regret was not having been able to carry out his plans for more killings. In an unfolding drama that has riveted France, about 300 police, cordoned off a five-storey building in a suburb of Toulouse where the 24-year-old Muslim shooter is holed up. The shooter is identified as Mohamed Merah.Authorities said the gunman, a French citizen of Algerian origin, had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he claimed to have received training from al Qaeda.

Merah told police negotiators he had killed three French soldiers last week and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.” He has no regrets, except not having more time to kill more people and he boasts that he has brought France to its knees," Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins, part of the anti-terrorist unit leading the investigation, told a news conference. The gunman, who filmed his killings with a small camera, had already identified another soldier and two police officers he wished to kill, Molins said. The gunman had repeated promises to surrender this evening to members of the elite RAID unit surrounding the house, which had been evacuated of its other residents.” He has explained that he is not suicidal, that he does not have the soul of a martyr and that he prefers to kill but to stay alive himself," Molins said.Sarkozy, who is running for re-election in five weeks time, paid tribute at a ceremony in an army barracks in Montauban, near Toulouse, to the three soldiers of North African origin killed last week. A fourth soldier of Caribbean origin is in a coma.” Our soldiers have not died in the way for which they had prepared themselves. This was not a death on the battlefield but a terrorist execution," Sarkozy said, standing before three coffins draped in the French flag after paying his respects to bereaved relatives.” We must remain united. We should in no way yield to discrimination or vengeance," he said in his eulogy.” France can only be great in unity. We owe it to the memory of these men; we owe it to the three murdered children, to all the victims."Sarkozy's appeal for national unity came after far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a rival presidential candidate, said France should wage war on Islamic fundamentalism.

 Interior Minister Claude Gueant said Merah was a member of an ideological Islamic group in France but this organisation 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, where he has been living, in exchange for a mobile phone, but was still armed. Two police officers were injured in a firelight with the gunman after police swooped at 3 am local time (0200 GMT).Police sources said they had conducted a controlled explosion of the suspect's car at around 9 am (0800 GMT) after discovering it was loaded with weapons. Officials said police had also arrested Merah's girlfriend and his brother, who is also known to authorities as a radical Islamist.Gueant said Merah had contacted the first soldier he attacked on 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.Merah's telephone 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  that investigators had also received a tipoff from a scooter repair shop in Toulouse where the gunman asked to change the colour of the Yamaha scooter used to flee the shootings and to remove a GPS tracker device.A group of young men from Merah's neighbourhood 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 cliche," 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 with a camera strapped to his body.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.

NEWS,19.03.2012.

Gunman kills three children, teacher outside school

A teacher and his two sons are among four dead after a gunman opened fire outside a school in France. The 30-year-old Jewish teacher and his 3-year-old and six-year-old sons were killed outside a Jewish school in the city of Toulouse just before school started. Another child between 8-10 years old was also killed. Toulouse prosecutor Michel Valet said a 17-year-old was wounded. The gunman escaped on a motorbike.” The attacker was shooting people outside the school, and then pursued children into the school, before fleeing on a heavy motorbike," Valet told reporters. The attack's being linked with two similar shootings by a motorcycle gunman in the region last week, in which three French paratroopers of Arab extraction was killed in the same area of southwest France.” I saw two people dead in front of the school, an adult and a child ... Inside, it was a vision of horror, the bodies of two small children," one father, searching for his son at the Ozar Hatorah school among crowds of distraught parents and children, told RTL radio. The soldiers, one of Caribbean and two of Muslim origin, also been killed in drive-by shootings and prosecutors opened an anti-terrorism investigation into all three attacks although it was not clear whether the motive was political or purely racist. The prosecutor confirmed that the same calibre firearm was used in the attack as in the killing of the three soldiers in two separate attacks by a man who escaped on a scooter. He could not say if it was exactly the same weapon. President Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, the Socialist opposing him in his uphill bid for re-election in May, both rushed to the scene.Sarkozy said he was struck by the similarities between the three attacks.” We don't know who this killer is and what is the exact link is to the drama that has hit the military community," Sarkozy said after arriving in Toulouse. "Everything must be done so that the killer is stopped and has to pay for his crimes.” Our schools must keep functioning, our compatriots that want to worship at synagogues, mosques and churches must be able to continue to do so. We should not give ground to terror.” Police cordoned off the school and a spokesman for the interior ministry said security was being tightened at all other Jewish schools in the country. France's 600,000-strong Jewish community is Europe's largest. There was mayhem around the small school in a leafy upscale neighbourhood of Toulouse, a booming industrial town. "All the children at this school were my children," one tearful mother told LCI television. The father looking for his son expressed disbelief: "How can they attack something as sacred as a school, attack children only 60 centimetres (two feet) tall?" he told RTL radio. As messages of condolence poured in from across Europe, representatives of France's Jewish community voiced their solidarity.” The whole Jewish community is in mourning," said Rabbi Moshe Lewin, a spokesman for France's great rabbi. "In the face of such a drama, such a horror, one cannot but go there.” Public prosecutor Valet said investigators were studying video evidence from the school shooting and the attack on Thursday in the nearby town of Montauban that killed two soldiers and left a third seriously injured. The three men, aged between 24 and 28, were shot while in uniform as they tried to withdraw money from a cash machine close to the barracks of the 17th parachute regiment. A third soldier, aged 30, was killed the previous weekend in Toulouse. Investigators said the same weapon had been used in both incidents. The shootings could thrust security back to the top of the agenda in a bitter electoral campaign that has been dominated by issues of taxation and immigration. Political analyst Stefane Rozes, head of CAP political consultancy, said the shooting was unlikely to have a decisive impact on France's election campaign as all candidates were strongly condemning the violence.