MAGNES
21st March 2012, 10:13 AM
The shootings were done by a Muslim, they are spinning this as an act of terrorism,
media tried to pin it on " neo nazi " with no evidence at first.
Toulouse shooting: French police surround house of 'jihadist'
French police are engagaged in a stand-off with a self-proclaimed al Qaeda jihadist, suspected of killing three children, a teacher and three soldiers, after swooping on a house in an early morning raid.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9157043/Toulouse-shooting-French-police-surround-house-of-jihadist.html
4:47AM GMT 21 Mar 2012
Armed police exchanged shots with the man, who is refusing to surrender, after descending on the house in Toulouse at 3am. His brother was arrested at a separate location.
The 24 year-old, known as Mohammed, told police he was a jihadist for al Qaeda seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.
Police are concerned that he may have explosives and that he will blow up the building, in the Cote Pavee residential district, if they storm it.
Two police officers were injured as the operation got underway this morning. One was shot in the knee and one in the shoulder.
His mother, who is from Algeria, was brought to the scene but she refused to reason with him, saying she had "little control" over him.
Claude Gueant, the French interior minister, who is at the scene, said: "He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda.
"He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions."
Mr Gueant said the suspect's mother would not help police.
"She was asked to make contact with her son, to reason with him, but she did not want to, saying she had little influence on him," he said.
The area surrounding the house was cordoned off by police officers wearing full body armour and helmets, thought to be members of France's special weapons squad RAID.
Mr Gueant said. "This person has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past ... and says he belongs to Al-Qaeda and says he wanted to avenge Palestinian children and to attack the French army."
A source close to the inquiry told AFP a 24-year-old suspect had exchanged words with the RAID team.
Neighbours expressed their shock at the arrest in the "peaceful" neighbourhood.
"I could never imagine he'd be in this neighbourhood," said 55-year-old Roland as he left the police cordon to head for work. "But I heard the gunfire and thought straight away of the serial killer."
Roland said the district was peaceful and law-abiding, adding that he had only ever been stopped by police once, 35 years previously.
Terrifying comparisons have been drawn between the gunman and Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who went on a shooting rampage that killed 77 young people at a holiday camp outside Oslo last July.
The serial killer executed all his victims with a shot to the head and may even have filmed his racist killing spree with a view to posting it on the internet.
The scooter gunman shot each of his seven victims, including three young children, at such close range that the gunfire burned their skin, a French prosecutor revealed on Tuesday.
"The killer had a camera strapped to his chest (during the school attack) that would allow him to film and view the footage on a computer," confirmed Claude Gueant, France's Interior Minister, on Tuesday. "The camera is a clue. It adds to the psychological profile we're establishing for the killer."
It was thought to be the same kind of camera that Breivik recommended in a rambling racist manifesto published ahead of his massacre.
The shootings began on March 11, when an paratrooper of North African origin arranged to meet someone in Toulouse to sell him a scooter he had advertised online, revealing in the ad his military status.
Imad Ibn Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant in the 1st Airborne Transportation Regiment, was shot in the head at close range with a .45 calibre pistol, a method that was to become the suspect's signature.
Four days later three more paratroopers from another regiment were gunned down - two of them fatally - in identical fashion in a street in the garrison town of Montauban, 45 kilometres (29 miles) away.
The dead - Corporal Abel Chennouf, 25, and Private First Class Mohammed Legouade, 23, both of the 17t Parachute Engineering Regiment - were French soldiers of North African Arab origin.
Arab soldiers are prized targets for groups like Al-Qaeda, which regards Muslims who fight for Western armies as traitors.
Then on Monday the shooter, still wearing a motorcycle helmet and riding a scooter, opened fire outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, a religious studies teacher, his toddler sons and a seven-year-old girl.
Anti-terrorist magistrates said the same gun and and make of scooter was used in all three attacks and noted that the three attacks were carried out at precise four-day intervals.
On Wednesday, the bodies of the four Jewish victims arrived in Israel.
Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego arrived at Ben Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv shortly before daw. They were to be buried later in the day.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CNN
French police surround suspect in Toulouse shootings
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/21/world/europe/france-shooting/
Toulouse, France (CNN) -- About 300 police officers surrounded an apartment in the south of France Wednesday, trying to coax a man whom authorities called a self-styled al Qaeda jihadist to surrender after a series of shootings that left seven people dead.
Soon after special operations police mounted their raid in Toulouse at 3:30 a.m., shots were fired from inside the apartment, wounding two officers, police said.
The man later threw a handgun out the window, but he has other guns, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
As the standoff stretched to its sixth hour, Gueant said he expected the suspect to give himself up in the afternoon.
Gueant said the suspect had told him that, adding that he hoped the man was telling the truth.
A prosecution official in Paris named the suspect as Mohammed Merah, 23. He was born in Toulouse, said Elisabeth Allanic, a magistrate at the prosecutors office.
He broke off communications with police late in the morning, Gueant told reporters, but started talking again several hours later, a police officer said.
The suspect was being stubborn and difficult to talk to, said Didier Martinez, a Toulouse police press officer.
Merah had been under surveillance by French intelligence for years, the interior minister said.
He had "already committed certain infractions, some with violence," Gueant said.
He was in a Toulouse court February 24 for causing an accident with injuries and driving without a license and was sentenced to a month in jail, his lawyer Christian Etelin said on BFM-TV.
He has not begun serving that sentence, Etelin said.
Gueant said the suspect had a car containing more weapons near his apartment.
Merah is accused of killing seven people in the last 10 days: a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school on Monday, and three soldiers of North African origin who had recently returned from Afghanistan in two earlier incidents.
As the siege went on, French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke at a memorial service for the three paratroopers, calling their killing "a terrorist execution."
Earlier he said he would meet with Muslim and Jewish leaders and asked the nation "to unite together to show that terrorism will not be able to fracture our national community.
"France must be stronger than ever in national unity. We owe this to the victims who were assassinated in cold blood," he said.
Gueant said the suspect is a French national of Algerian origin who spent considerable time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"He claims to be a jihadist and says he belongs to al Qaeda," Gueant told reporters at the scene. "He wanted to avenge the Palestinian children and take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions."
The minister did not say how he knew this.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad strongly rejected using his people as a justification for the French killings, calling them a "cowardly terrorist attack."
"It is time for those criminals to stop exploiting the name of Palestine through their terrorist actions," Fayyad said in a statement.
France has about 4,000 troops supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The government has said it will pull them out by 2013.
The suspect belongs to a group called Forsane Alizza, or Knights of Glory, Gueant said.
The French government banned the group in January for trying to recruit people to fight in Afghanistan.
Announcing the ban on the group, Gueant said it is "unacceptable that in our country a group is training people for armed struggle."
The group issued a "chilling warning" on its Facebook page before it was banned earlier this year, calling on supporters to attack Americans, Jews and French soldiers, terror expert Sajjan Gohel said.
This month's shooting spree, which targeted minorities, prompted France to put the region on scarlet alert, the highest level in the country.
Police tracked the suspect down via his brother's computer IP address, which was apparently used to respond to an ad posted by the first victim, Gueant said.
Imad Ibn Ziaten, a paratrooper of North African origin, arranged to meet a man in Toulouse to sell him a scooter which he had advertised online, the minister said. The victim said in the ad that he was in the military.
A message sent from the suspect's brother's IP address was used to set up an appointment to inspect the bike, an appointment at which the paratrooper was killed on March 11, Gueant said.
Four days later, two other soldiers were shot dead and another injured by a black-clad man wearing a motorcycle helmet in the southwestern French city of Montauban, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Toulouse.
In the attack at the private Jewish school Ozar Hartorah on Monday, a man wearing a motorcycle helmet and driving a motor scooter pulled up and shot a teacher and three children -- two of them the teacher's young sons -- in the head.
The other victim, the daughter of the school's director, was killed in front of her father.
Police said the same guns were used in all three attacks.
Police launched an intense manhunt, and on Wednesday night zeroed in on the apartment, located about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the Jewish school.
Throughout the standoff, Sarkozy remained in constant communication with the interior minister, the presidential palace said.
Meanwhile, the bodies of the four victims in the school shooting arrived in Israel, where they were buried in Jerusalem Wednesday morning.
"Today, all Israel is in pain and mourning over the deaths of innocent children and a dedicated father," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told the families as the coffins were lowered from the plane.
The decision to send the bodies to Israel was made because of their faith, according to the Consistory of Paris, a group representing Jewish communities. France has one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe.
As practicing Jews, their burial in the birthplace of Judaism ensures that their remains will not be tampered with, the consistory added. Forty percent of French practicing Jews are buried in Israel, it said.
The teacher, Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, was born and raised in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, but pursued his religious studies in Israel. He married and had children, before returning to teach at the Toulouse school, the consistory said.
His sons, Gabriel, 4, and Arieh, 5, were buried with him.
The other victim, 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego, was also buried.
CNN's Marilia Brocchetto, Aliza Kassim, Stephanie Halasz, Dheepthi Namasivayam, Anna Pritchard and Kareem Khadder contributed to this report.
media tried to pin it on " neo nazi " with no evidence at first.
Toulouse shooting: French police surround house of 'jihadist'
French police are engagaged in a stand-off with a self-proclaimed al Qaeda jihadist, suspected of killing three children, a teacher and three soldiers, after swooping on a house in an early morning raid.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9157043/Toulouse-shooting-French-police-surround-house-of-jihadist.html
4:47AM GMT 21 Mar 2012
Armed police exchanged shots with the man, who is refusing to surrender, after descending on the house in Toulouse at 3am. His brother was arrested at a separate location.
The 24 year-old, known as Mohammed, told police he was a jihadist for al Qaeda seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.
Police are concerned that he may have explosives and that he will blow up the building, in the Cote Pavee residential district, if they storm it.
Two police officers were injured as the operation got underway this morning. One was shot in the knee and one in the shoulder.
His mother, who is from Algeria, was brought to the scene but she refused to reason with him, saying she had "little control" over him.
Claude Gueant, the French interior minister, who is at the scene, said: "He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda.
"He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions."
Mr Gueant said the suspect's mother would not help police.
"She was asked to make contact with her son, to reason with him, but she did not want to, saying she had little influence on him," he said.
The area surrounding the house was cordoned off by police officers wearing full body armour and helmets, thought to be members of France's special weapons squad RAID.
Mr Gueant said. "This person has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past ... and says he belongs to Al-Qaeda and says he wanted to avenge Palestinian children and to attack the French army."
A source close to the inquiry told AFP a 24-year-old suspect had exchanged words with the RAID team.
Neighbours expressed their shock at the arrest in the "peaceful" neighbourhood.
"I could never imagine he'd be in this neighbourhood," said 55-year-old Roland as he left the police cordon to head for work. "But I heard the gunfire and thought straight away of the serial killer."
Roland said the district was peaceful and law-abiding, adding that he had only ever been stopped by police once, 35 years previously.
Terrifying comparisons have been drawn between the gunman and Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who went on a shooting rampage that killed 77 young people at a holiday camp outside Oslo last July.
The serial killer executed all his victims with a shot to the head and may even have filmed his racist killing spree with a view to posting it on the internet.
The scooter gunman shot each of his seven victims, including three young children, at such close range that the gunfire burned their skin, a French prosecutor revealed on Tuesday.
"The killer had a camera strapped to his chest (during the school attack) that would allow him to film and view the footage on a computer," confirmed Claude Gueant, France's Interior Minister, on Tuesday. "The camera is a clue. It adds to the psychological profile we're establishing for the killer."
It was thought to be the same kind of camera that Breivik recommended in a rambling racist manifesto published ahead of his massacre.
The shootings began on March 11, when an paratrooper of North African origin arranged to meet someone in Toulouse to sell him a scooter he had advertised online, revealing in the ad his military status.
Imad Ibn Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant in the 1st Airborne Transportation Regiment, was shot in the head at close range with a .45 calibre pistol, a method that was to become the suspect's signature.
Four days later three more paratroopers from another regiment were gunned down - two of them fatally - in identical fashion in a street in the garrison town of Montauban, 45 kilometres (29 miles) away.
The dead - Corporal Abel Chennouf, 25, and Private First Class Mohammed Legouade, 23, both of the 17t Parachute Engineering Regiment - were French soldiers of North African Arab origin.
Arab soldiers are prized targets for groups like Al-Qaeda, which regards Muslims who fight for Western armies as traitors.
Then on Monday the shooter, still wearing a motorcycle helmet and riding a scooter, opened fire outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, a religious studies teacher, his toddler sons and a seven-year-old girl.
Anti-terrorist magistrates said the same gun and and make of scooter was used in all three attacks and noted that the three attacks were carried out at precise four-day intervals.
On Wednesday, the bodies of the four Jewish victims arrived in Israel.
Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego arrived at Ben Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv shortly before daw. They were to be buried later in the day.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CNN
French police surround suspect in Toulouse shootings
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/21/world/europe/france-shooting/
Toulouse, France (CNN) -- About 300 police officers surrounded an apartment in the south of France Wednesday, trying to coax a man whom authorities called a self-styled al Qaeda jihadist to surrender after a series of shootings that left seven people dead.
Soon after special operations police mounted their raid in Toulouse at 3:30 a.m., shots were fired from inside the apartment, wounding two officers, police said.
The man later threw a handgun out the window, but he has other guns, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
As the standoff stretched to its sixth hour, Gueant said he expected the suspect to give himself up in the afternoon.
Gueant said the suspect had told him that, adding that he hoped the man was telling the truth.
A prosecution official in Paris named the suspect as Mohammed Merah, 23. He was born in Toulouse, said Elisabeth Allanic, a magistrate at the prosecutors office.
He broke off communications with police late in the morning, Gueant told reporters, but started talking again several hours later, a police officer said.
The suspect was being stubborn and difficult to talk to, said Didier Martinez, a Toulouse police press officer.
Merah had been under surveillance by French intelligence for years, the interior minister said.
He had "already committed certain infractions, some with violence," Gueant said.
He was in a Toulouse court February 24 for causing an accident with injuries and driving without a license and was sentenced to a month in jail, his lawyer Christian Etelin said on BFM-TV.
He has not begun serving that sentence, Etelin said.
Gueant said the suspect had a car containing more weapons near his apartment.
Merah is accused of killing seven people in the last 10 days: a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school on Monday, and three soldiers of North African origin who had recently returned from Afghanistan in two earlier incidents.
As the siege went on, French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke at a memorial service for the three paratroopers, calling their killing "a terrorist execution."
Earlier he said he would meet with Muslim and Jewish leaders and asked the nation "to unite together to show that terrorism will not be able to fracture our national community.
"France must be stronger than ever in national unity. We owe this to the victims who were assassinated in cold blood," he said.
Gueant said the suspect is a French national of Algerian origin who spent considerable time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"He claims to be a jihadist and says he belongs to al Qaeda," Gueant told reporters at the scene. "He wanted to avenge the Palestinian children and take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions."
The minister did not say how he knew this.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad strongly rejected using his people as a justification for the French killings, calling them a "cowardly terrorist attack."
"It is time for those criminals to stop exploiting the name of Palestine through their terrorist actions," Fayyad said in a statement.
France has about 4,000 troops supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The government has said it will pull them out by 2013.
The suspect belongs to a group called Forsane Alizza, or Knights of Glory, Gueant said.
The French government banned the group in January for trying to recruit people to fight in Afghanistan.
Announcing the ban on the group, Gueant said it is "unacceptable that in our country a group is training people for armed struggle."
The group issued a "chilling warning" on its Facebook page before it was banned earlier this year, calling on supporters to attack Americans, Jews and French soldiers, terror expert Sajjan Gohel said.
This month's shooting spree, which targeted minorities, prompted France to put the region on scarlet alert, the highest level in the country.
Police tracked the suspect down via his brother's computer IP address, which was apparently used to respond to an ad posted by the first victim, Gueant said.
Imad Ibn Ziaten, a paratrooper of North African origin, arranged to meet a man in Toulouse to sell him a scooter which he had advertised online, the minister said. The victim said in the ad that he was in the military.
A message sent from the suspect's brother's IP address was used to set up an appointment to inspect the bike, an appointment at which the paratrooper was killed on March 11, Gueant said.
Four days later, two other soldiers were shot dead and another injured by a black-clad man wearing a motorcycle helmet in the southwestern French city of Montauban, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Toulouse.
In the attack at the private Jewish school Ozar Hartorah on Monday, a man wearing a motorcycle helmet and driving a motor scooter pulled up and shot a teacher and three children -- two of them the teacher's young sons -- in the head.
The other victim, the daughter of the school's director, was killed in front of her father.
Police said the same guns were used in all three attacks.
Police launched an intense manhunt, and on Wednesday night zeroed in on the apartment, located about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the Jewish school.
Throughout the standoff, Sarkozy remained in constant communication with the interior minister, the presidential palace said.
Meanwhile, the bodies of the four victims in the school shooting arrived in Israel, where they were buried in Jerusalem Wednesday morning.
"Today, all Israel is in pain and mourning over the deaths of innocent children and a dedicated father," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told the families as the coffins were lowered from the plane.
The decision to send the bodies to Israel was made because of their faith, according to the Consistory of Paris, a group representing Jewish communities. France has one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe.
As practicing Jews, their burial in the birthplace of Judaism ensures that their remains will not be tampered with, the consistory added. Forty percent of French practicing Jews are buried in Israel, it said.
The teacher, Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, was born and raised in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, but pursued his religious studies in Israel. He married and had children, before returning to teach at the Toulouse school, the consistory said.
His sons, Gabriel, 4, and Arieh, 5, were buried with him.
The other victim, 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego, was also buried.
CNN's Marilia Brocchetto, Aliza Kassim, Stephanie Halasz, Dheepthi Namasivayam, Anna Pritchard and Kareem Khadder contributed to this report.