Man in bank siege claims links to al-Qaida

French police stormed a bank in Toulouse yesterday, arresting a gunman with psychiatric problems who claimed to be an al-Qaida militant and freeing his two hostages after a seven-hour siege.

The 26-year-old, who had taken four bank employees hostage in the morning in the same area where serial killer Mohamed Merah lived and was shot dead by police in March, was wounded in the stomach in the assault, police said.

The two other hostages, both women, had been released earlier, and no police officers were injured in the operation yesterday afternoon.

Nearly seven hours earlier the man had entered the CIC bank, demanded money, then fired a shot and took the bank manager and other staff hostage, saying he wanted to negotiate with the elite RAID police unit that killed Merah.

Before the police went in local prosecutor Michel Valet said the gunman “wishes to make it known that this is not at all about money and that his motives are based on religious convictions”.

“We don’t yet know if this is a robbery that went wrong or if (the hostage taking) is a premeditated act,” a police source told AFP.

The man called himself “Boumaza” and had a criminal record, police said.

Another source said he was schizophrenic and “may have stopped treatment”.

He was “put in a foster home when he was little and suffers from rage and fears the outside world”, his sister told AFP. She said he was not very religious, adding, “we went to nightclubs and drank alcohol”.

He entered the bank at around 10am and insistently asked for money but staff did not take him seriously, police said. He then produced a gun and took everybody hostage.

Parents of pupils at a nearby school were sent a text message telling them to pick up their children, witnesses said, and rapid-intervention GIPN police units were dispatched from southern cities Bordeaux and Marseilles.

The RAID unit that shot Merah after he went on a killing spree is based in Paris, hundreds of kilometres to the north.

The bank and Merah’s former flat are within 500m of each other in Toulouse’s Cote Pavee neighbourhood, east of the city centre.

Merah was killed at the end of a 32-hour siege of his flat after he shot dead seven people in a wave of killings that shocked the country.

“We’re going through the same thing as three months ago,” Maria Gonzalez, a mother with two children who could not go home because of the police cordon, said before yesterday’s incident was resolved.