Standoff in France
Police press for the surrender of holed-up ‘al-qaeda’ man suspected in killings
French police ready to storm building for al-qaeda man suspected in seven killings.
TOULOUSE: After a pre-dawn raid erupted into a firefight, French riot police pressed for the surrender of a holed-up gunman who is a suspect in seven killings and claiming allegiance to al-qaeda. A prosecutor said the man was planning to kill another soldier imminently.
After 13 hours of negotiations, one French official said hundreds of police were ready to storm the building in the southwestern city of Toulouse to end the standoff.
Three police have already been wounded trying to arrest the 24year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent who is suspected of killing three Jewish children, a rabbi and three French paratroopers.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said the gunman, Mohamed Merah, had been to Afghanistan twice and had trained in the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan.
An Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the suspect has been under surveillance for years for having “fundamentalist” Islamic views.
The police raid was part of France’s biggest manhunt since a wave of terrorist attacks in the 1990s by Algerian extremists.
The chase began after France’s worst-ever school shooting on Monday and two previous attacks on paratroopers, killings that have horrified the country and frozen the campaigning for the French presidential election next month.
Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said the suspect has promised to turn himself into police shortly.
Delage said if that doesn’t happen, police will force their way in.
The suspect had told police he belonged to al-qaeda and wanted to take revenge for Palestinian children killed in the Middle East, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said, adding that the man was also angry about French military intervention abroad.
In the negotiations yesterday, the suspect “expresses no regret, only that he didn’t have time to have more victims. And he even bragged of bringing France to its knees,” the prosecutor said.
Police swept in soon after 3am to the residential neighbourhood in northern Toulouse where the suspect was holed up.
At one point, volleys of gunfire were exchanged.
The suspect promised several times to surrender in the afternoon, then stopped talking to negotiators, Gueant said. In the early afternoon, he resumed talking.
French authorities said the suspect threw a Colt .45 handgun used in each of the three attacks out a window in exchange for a device to talk to authorities, but has more weapons like an AK-47 assault rifle. Gueant said other weapons had been found in the suspect’s car.
“The main concern is to arrest him, and to arrest him in conditions by which we can present him to judicial officials,” Gueant said, explaining authorities want to “take him alive ... It is imperative for us.”
The first French paratrooper killed was shot on March 11 after posting an announcement online to sell his motorcycle and investigators believe the gunman responded and lured the paratrooper into an isolated place to kill him.
Those slain at the Jewish school, all of French-israeli nationality, were buried in Israel yesterday as relatives sobbed inconsolably.