Gunman died in hail of bullets after raid
Mohamed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, died from a gunshot wound to his head yesterday at the end of a 30-hour standoff with police at his apartment in a suburb of Toulouse in southern France and after confessing to killing three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi.
He was firing at police from a Colt 45 pistol as he climbed through a window onto a veranda and toppled to the ground five feet below, according to police.
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,” interior minister Claude Gueant told reporters at the scene.
“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.”
Paris prosecutor François Molins said Merah had taken refuge in his bathroom, wearing a bullet-proof vest under his traditional black djellaba robe, as elite police blasted his flat through the night with flash grenades.
Police investigators were working to establish whether Merah had worked alone or with accomplices, Molins said, adding that Merah had filmed his three shooting attacks with a camera hung from his body and had indicated that he had posted clips online.
The most disturbing image of the attacks showed him grabbing a young girl at a Jewish school on Monday by the hair and shooting her in the head before escaping on a scooter.
Elite commandos had been in a standoff since the early hours of Wednesday with Merah, periodically firing shots or deploying small explosives until mid-morning yesterday 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 fired through his front door at police when they swooped on his flat on Wednesday morning, but later he negotiated with police, promising to give himself up and saying he did not want to die.
By late Wednesday evening, he changed tack again, telling negotiators he wanted to die “like a Mujahideen,” weapon in hand, and would not go to prison, Molins said.
“‘If it’s me (who dies), too bad, I will go to paradise. If it’s you, too bad for you’,” Molins quoted Merah as saying.
Merah told negotiators he was trained by al-Qaida in Pakistan and killed three soldiers last week and four people at a Jewish school on Monday to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and because of French army involvement in Afghanistan.
In his video recording of his shooting of the soldiers, Merah cried: “‘If you kill my brothers, I kill you’,” Molins said.
Merah had staked out the first soldier he killed after replying to an advert about a scooter, investigators said, and had identified another soldier and two police officers he wanted to kill.
His use of his mother’s computer to lure his first victim, a French soldier of North African heritage like himself, gave police a vital clue, but not in time to prevent the other killings.
Merah has a police record for several minor offences, some involving violence, and was on the radar of French intelligence.
The Memri Middle East think tank said he may belong to a French al-Qaida branch called Fursan Al-Izza, ideologically aligned with a movement to Islamise Western states by implementing Shariah law, but Gueant said there was no evidence he belonged to any fundamentalist group.
Friends spoke of him as an amateur soccer player, not outwardly religious and fond of night clubs.
Merah, who had an Uzi and Kalashnikov assault rifle in his flat, 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.
— Reuters
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