NEWS,06.04.2012.

Fears of another motorbike serial killer after four shootings in Paris

Police in Paris have linked a 7.65mm gun to four separate murders in the Essone area of the capital since November, raising the possibility of another serial killer following the death of Mohamed Merah in Toulouse on 22 March.The fourth victim, a 47-year-old woman of Algerian origin, was shot four times in the head on Thursday. The gunman was seen to flee on a motorbike.Interior Minister Claude Guéant told radio  Europe-1: "This series of killings deserves our maximum attention and we're putting all our resources into this affair." Prosecutor Marie-Suzanne Le Quéau told a press conference that police were trying to determine whether there the victims were linked, and whether there was one killer or more than one: "On the theory of a serial killer, I will simply say that three of the murders  the second, third and fourth, show similarities."However, it was also stressed that as yet no terrorism link had been made, unlike in the seven murders around Toulouse by Merah, who also used a motorbike.Le Quéau said that a suspect in the first attack was still being held, but had retracted a confession. The fourth victim, Nadjia Lahsene, was shot while in the entrance hall of her housing block in the district of Grigny. A neighbour was quoted as saying: "Everyone is in shock. She didn't feel threatened. She's a normal person, simple, no history." Police appealed for witnwsses who saw the gunman, described as tall and slim.The first victim, Nathalie Davids, a 35-year-old lab assistant, was shot in her block's carpark in Grigny on 27 November. On 22 February, her 52-year old neighbour, Jean-Yves Bonnerue, was killed in the entrance to their building. The third, an 81-year old man, was shot in the suburb of Ris-Orangis on 19 March. 19th.Le Queau said that over 100 officers have been deployed to investigate the case and carry out identity checks in the area of the attacks. All were killed execution-style, with shots in the head. Le Quéau also said that all four deaths occurred at the same time of day, around 4 to 6 pm. Their locations are also near two trunk roads, allowing a fast escape.Following the first murder, a man aged 46 was arrested in December; he had been jilted during an affair with the woman, and had a record for petty crime. While in custody and with his lawyer, the man had confessed, but he then made a retraction in front of the investigating judge.The killings come as France is still distressed by the terror attacks in the south that left dead three Jewish children and a rabbi, plus three paratroopers. Mohamed Merah, the al Qaeda-inspired gunman, also used a powerful motorbike. He was identified, put under siege in his flat, and shot dead while leaping out of the window.France is holding the first round of its presidential election on 22 April, and the Toulouse case has played into a sharpening of the tone in the campaign; an opinion poll put Socialist François Hollande's lead over President Nicolas Sarkozy at its narrowest so far.

Tearful Hugo Chávez prays for God to spare him from cancer

'I have more to do for this country,' Venezuelan president pleads at pre-Easter mass after latest round of treatment in CubaThe Venezuelan president wept in a televised speech from the Catholic service in his home state of Barinas. His voice broke as he eulogised Jesus, the revolutionary fighter Che Guevara and the South American independence hero Simon Bolívar. "Give me your crown, Jesus. Give me your cross, your thorns so that I may bleed. But give me life, because I have more to do for this country and these people. Do not take me yet," Chávez said, standing below an image of Jesus with the Crucifix. Chávez said he had held faith that his cancer would not return after his first two operations last year  which removed a baseball sized tumour from his pelvis  but it did."Today I have more faith than yesterday," he said. "Life has been a hurricane ... but a couple of years ago my life began to become not my own any more. Who said the path of revolution would be easy?"Very little is known about the 57-year-old president's condition, including even what type of cancer he has. Chávez has undergone three operations in less than a year and received two sessions of radiotherapy. He has said the latest surgery was successful, that he is recovering well and will be fit to win a new six-year term at an election in October. But big questions remain about his future and on Thursday the strain appeared to show."Never forget that we are the children of giants ... I could not avoid some tears," the former soldier said as his parents and other relatives looked on from the church rows. Chávez soon seemed to recover his composure, joking with his brother Adan in the congregation that few people were watching because it was Easter, when Venezuelans typically hit the beach. After 13 years of his rule over the continent's biggest oil exporter, Chávez's sickness has thrown its politics into turmoil in the run-up to the election on 7 October.Flying back and forth to Havana for treatment, Chávez has been forced to run a kind of virtual campaign via Twitter and appearances on state television, while his opposition rival Henrique Capriles tours the country.He returned to Barinas late on Wednesday from Havana, where he had undergone a second session of radiotherapy. He said it went well and that all the test results had been positive.But in the absence of detailed information on his condition, Venezuelans have hunted for clues in his appearance each time he is on state TV. One local news website ran a large photo of his heavily perspiring brow after he disembarked from the jet.One Venezuelan opposition journalist who has broken news on Chávez's condition in the past reported that his medical team continued to disagree among themselves over the best course, and a Brazilian blogger said he might travel there for treatment.Capriles has mostly kept quiet about the president's illness, preferring to wish him a speedy recovery so that he can beat him in a fair fight at the polls.But the youthful state governor has criticised Chávez for choosing to be treated abroad, saying it sends a bad message to ordinary Venezuelans if he does not trust local doctors.Capriles, 39, took issue this week with repeated comments by Chávez and his allies that Jesus must have been a fellow leftist radical. "This theme is an obsession of the eternal candidate," Capriles said on Twitter, referring to Chávez. "This holy week we should remember Christ was neither socialist nor capitalist.In the latest opinion poll released last month the president had a solid 13 percentage point lead over Capriles, but many voters remained undecided.

NEWS,24.03.2012.

French intelligence under fire over al Qaeda shooter

The French government has been forced to reject accusations that intelligence lapses allowed a young Muslim with a violent criminal record, spotted twice in Afghanistan, to become the first al Qaeda-inspired killer to strike on its soil.Hardened by battling Islamic militants from its former North African colony of Algeria, France's security services have long been regarded as among the most effective in Europe, having prevented militant attacks on French soil for the last 15 years.Opposition politicians, including far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, suggested that negligence or errors had permitted Mohamed Merah, 23, to carry out three deadly shootings within 10 days before he was identified, located and killed.But Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the police and intelligence agencies had done an exemplary job, and Interior Minister Claude Gueant said there had been no grounds for arresting the gunman or restricting his movements prior to this month's attacks, despite him being on a US "no-fly" list."Resolving a criminal case of this importance in 10 days, I believe that's practically unprecedented in the history of our country," Fillon told RTL radio.In an interview with the daily Le Figaro to be published on Saturday, Gueant said people could not be interrogated for having criminal thoughts."Neither he, nor those that he frequented, had ever shown the least sign of being dangerous," he said, adding that many people were on US no-fly lists simply for having visited countries like Pakistan. "I remind you that this man was French and therefore it was impossible to forbid him to move around in France."Foreign Minister Alain Juppe had appeared to acknowledged on Thursday that there were grounds to question possible security flaws, saying: "We need to bring some clarity to this."Merah shot dead three Jewish children and four adults in three attacks despite having been under surveillance by the DCRI domestic intelligence agency, which questioned him as recently as November."Since the DCRI was following Mohamed Merah for a year, how come they took so long to locate him?" Socialist party security spokesman Francois Rebsamen asked on the JDD.fr website.Merah's elder brother Abdelkader, 29, who is being questioned by police, was also on a security watch list after being linked with the smuggling of Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007, government officials said.The left-leaning daily Liberation asked in an editorial whether the intelligence services had not "failed miserably"."How could they have so underestimated the potential danger of an individual they already knew?"Merah, a French citizen of Algerian extraction, amassed a cache of at least eight guns under the noses of French intelligence, including several Colt .45 pistols of the kind he used in the shootings, but also at least one Uzi submachine gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun.In Washington, two US officials said Merah was on a US government "no fly" list, barring him from boarding any US-bound aircraft. His name had been on the list for some time.Rebsamen said that after the shooting of two paratroopers in Montauban, near Toulouse, on March 15, Merah's name was on top of a DCRI list of 20 people to be particularly closely watched in the southwestern Midi-Pyrenees region. Yet the agency appeared to have lost trace of him.Investigators only tracked down Merah on Tuesday, a day after he had shot dead three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school. Gueant has said Merah was positively identified when a police helicopter overflew his home and he came to the window.Merah was shot dead by a sniper after a gun battle with police on Thursday that ended a more than 30-hour siege at his Toulouse apartment. An autopsy showed the shootout left his body riddled with bullets, including two deadly shots to the head and abdomen, a legal source said on Friday.The founder of the GIGN elite police force, which was not involved in the raid, criticised the RAID special commandos for failing to capture Merah alive, and said they should have used tear gas to overpower him."How can it be that the top police unit fails to capture a man who is alone?" Christian Prouteau, who headed the GIGN in the 1980s, told regional daily Ouest France. "They should have pumped him with tear gas. He wouldn't have lasted five minutes."Police came up with his name when a list of 576 people who viewed an Internet advertisement placed by the shooter's first victim was compared with the DCRI's watchlist on Monday and led them to the IP address of Merah's mother.He had, however, been known to the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI) - the powerful super agency created by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 - since 2010. Merah first visited Afghanistan that year, was stopped at a checkpoint by Afghan police in Kandahar province and sent back to France by American forces.His second visit ended after three months last October when he contracted hepatitis and returned home, according to the public prosecutor in charge of the case.He was interviewed by DCRI agents in Toulouse in November but told them he had been on holiday - and even showed them photographs, prosecutor Francois Molins said.Merah told police negotiators at his besieged home on Wednesday that he trained at an al Qaeda camp in the lawless Pakistani border region of Waziristan during the same trip.Gueant already rejected accusations of intelligence slip-ups on Thursday, saying: " The DCRI follows lots of people involved in radical Islam. Expressing ideas, espousing Salafist beliefs, is not a sufficient reason to arrest someone."Although Merah could not have been arrested without proof of criminal intent, critics say authorities could have taken intermediate steps. French anti-terrorist law allows for the telephones of suspects to be tapped without judicial approval on the authority of the prime minister and an advisory panel.Le Pen suggested the DCRI may have missed the gunman partly because it had been diverted by Sarkozy's government to snoop on journalists and political opponents.The agency's head, Bernard Squarcini, is under investigation himself for ordering the illegal surveillance of Le Monde reporters' telephones.Squarcini said in an interview with Le Monde that security officials had naturally asked themselves whether they had missed clues or could have acted differently or faster."But it was impossible to say on Sunday evening (after the first shooting on March 11) 'It's Merah, let's get him'."He also said Merah's attack on the Jewish school had been a spur-of-the-moment decision after the gunman failed to find a soldier he planned to kill, according to his conversation with police negotiators during the siege of his home.He said there were no signs Merah belonged to any radical Islamist network and he appeared to have turned fanatic alone.While allies Britain and Spain have suffered major militant attacks in the last decade, following the US-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, France had not seen a major attack on its soil since the mid-1990s.The Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) carried out a wave of attacks, including the bombing of a crowded commuter train in July 1995 which killed eight and injured 150 people.The rise of al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, posed a new challenge to French security services more used to watching Algerian-related militants, often with connections in what some French officials called "Londonistan".French-born Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States as one of the conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and French-born Muslims were also active among Jihadi militants in Iraq.The terror alert in France was raised after al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden singled it out as one of the worst offenders against Islam in October 2010.But despite a spate of kidnappings of French citizens abroad, there were no attacks in mainland France. Officials say the intelligence services foiled several plots.

NEWS,22.03.2012.

Gunman dies in hail of bullets as French siege ends

A 23-year-old gunman who said al Qaeda inspired him to kill seven people in France died in a hail of bullets as he scrambled out of a ground-floor window during a gun battle with elite police commandos. Mohamed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, died from gunshot wounds at the end of a 30-hour standoff with police yesterday at his apartment in southern France and after confessing to killing three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi.He was firing at police as he jumped out of the window, Interior Minister Claude Gueant told reporters near the five-storey building, in a suburb of the southern city of Toulouse. Two police commandos were injured in the operation - a dramatic climax to a siege which riveted the world after the killings shook France a month before a presidential election.” At the moment when a video probe was sent into the bathroom, the killer came out of the bathroom, firing with extreme violence," Gueant said. "In the end, Mohamed Merah jumped from the window with his gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground.”

 Elite RAID commandos had been locked in a tense standoff since the early hours of Thursday with Merah, periodically firing shots or deploying small explosives until mid-morning on Thursday to try and tire out the gunman so he could be captured. Surrounded by some 300 police, Merah had been silent and motionless for 12 hours when the commandos opted to go inside. Initially, he had fired through his front door at police when they swooped on his ground-floor flat on Thursday morning, but later he negotiated with police, promising to give himself up and saying he did not want to die. He told negotiators he was trained by al Qaeda in Pakistan and killed three soldiers last week and four people at a Jewish school on Tuesday to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and because of French army involvement in Afghanistan. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for re-election next month called Merah's killings terrorist attacks and announced a crackdown on people following extremist websites.” From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished," he said in a statement. "France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil.” His handling of the crisis could well impact an election race where for months he has lagged behind Socialist challenger Francois Hollande in opinion polls. Early on Thursday, the first opinion poll since the school shooting showed Sarkozy two points ahead of Hollande in the first-round vote on April 22, although Hollande still led by eight points for a May 6 runoff. Three years of economic gloom, and a personal style many see as brash and impulsive, have made Sarkozy highly unpopular in France, but his proven strong hand in a crisis gives him an edge over a rival who has no ministerial experience.Sarkozy vowed on Wednesday that justice would be done and urged people not to seek revenge.Merah had been under intelligence surveillance and the MEMRI Middle East think tank said he appeared to belong to a French al Qaeda branch called Fursan Al-Izza, ideologically aligned with a movement to Islamise Western states by implementing sharia law. He boasted to police negotiators that he had brought France to its knees, and that his only regret was not having been able to carry out more killings. French commandos had detonated three explosions just before midnight on Wednesday, flattening the main door of the building and blowing a hole in the wall, after it became clear Merah did not mean to keep a promise to turn himself in. They continued to fire shots roughly every hour, and stepped up the pace from dawn with flash grenades.” These were moves to intimidate the gunman who seems to have changed his mind and does not want to surrender," said interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet.He was tracked down after a no-holds-barred manhunt in France, during which presidential candidates suspended their campaigning. Immigration and Islam have been major campaign themes after Sarkozy tried to win over supporters of Le Pen, who accused the government of underestimating the threat from fundamentalism. Leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities have called for calm, pointing out the gunman was a lone extremist. On Thursday, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen accused Sarkozy's government of surrendering swathes of often impoverished suburban districts to Islamic fanatics, demanding that the last month of pre-election debate put the focus back on failing security.

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,20.03.2012.

Fears French gunman could strike again

French police stepped up the search today for a gunman who filmed his carnage as he shot dead three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school, fearing the killer could strike again.Officials believe the scooter-riding gunman is a trained marksman with "extremist" views who may also be responsible for last week's shootings of three soldiers of North African origin.

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy has said racism appeared to be the motivation for yesterday's school attack, which came just five weeks before the first round of the presidential election.Racist and anti-Semitic attacks are not uncommon in France.Immigrants and Islam have been major themes of the campaign as Sarkozy tries to win over the voters of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Analysts say the shootings could transform the election debate and possibly tone down populist rhetoric."We will track down this monster," Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said of the killer on France 2 television. "We will find him, bring him to justice and punish him."France is home to the largest Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe and has a history of attacks on both groups, but yesterday's shooting was the most deadly anti-Semitic attack on French soil in nearly 30 years.The police tightened security at religious sites, raised the terror alert in the southern town to the highest possible level and talked to gun clubs in an effort to track down the killer."It would be surprising if he stops now," one police officer involved in the investigation said.Surveillance tapes at the school showed the gunman recorded his shooting spree with a small video camera around his neck.He is also the prime suspect in the killing of three paratroopers in two separate shootings last week in Toulouse and the nearby town of Montauban."This shows a profile of the murderer as someone who is very cold, very determined, with precise gestures, and therefore very cruel," Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.In each attack, the gunman arrived on a stolen Yamaha scooter and used a Colt 45 handgun. His face was hidden by a motorcycle helmet during the attacks.The three dead soldiers included two members of the 17th parachute regiment. 

Police have interviewed three former soldiers expelled from the regiment for neo-Nazi activity in 2008, but a police source said they had been ruled out of the investigation.At the entrance of the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, a five-floor brick building in a leafy residential neighbourhood, residents and parents left floral tributes and candles in memory of the victims.A child who survived the attack spoke of his sheer terror as the shots rang out through the school."We were getting ready for prayers when the principal stormed in and screamed that there was a shooting. I panicked and fled to the old canteen and heard the shots, but saw nothing," an 11-year old boy told France Info radio."I thought he was going to come in any minute and finish us all. Then I waited and waited and then my daddy came to get me."Schools all over France observed a minute of silence."This has happened in Toulouse, in a religious school with children from Jewish families, but it could have happened here. The same killer could have come here, these children are exactly like you," Sarkozy said, attending the silent vigil in a Paris secondary school.The bodies of the four victims, who hold dual French-Israeli nationality, will be repatriated to Israel on Tuesday night, Joel Mergui,the head of a Jewish religious organisation, said.The Israeli embassy identified the victims as Jonathan Sandler, 30, his children Gabriel and Arieh, aged four and five, and Myriam Monsonego, seven.

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.