Toulouse Shooting Suspect Dead

By Ynetnews and EuroNews

Caskets carrying the bodies of the four Jews who were murdered in Monday’s attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse are due to arrive in Israel in the early morning hours of Wednesday morning.

Teacher Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, his 3-year-old and 6-year-old sons Gabriel and Arieh and 8-year-old Miriam Monsonego, daughter of school headmaster Rabbi Yaacov Monsonego, will be laid to rest in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul Cemetery.

After French police said former soldiers who were thought to have been involved in the shootings were cleared of any suspicion, the TF1 television network released the first photos of the gunman aboard the scooter used in the attack in Toulouse.

According to the TF1 report, the gunman was filmed just moments before the massacre. Police have been searching for the stolen Yamaha TMAX 530 scooter since Tuesday, the report said.

The scooter’s license plate number is CA-676-RT. It was stolen on March 6, according to the French station.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe is expected to arrive in Israel Wednesday to take part in the funerals. Knesset Speaker Rueven Rivlin, ministers Yuli Edelstein and Eli Yishai are also expected to attend, as are chief rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar.

In Israel, politicians have reacted angrily to comments made in the wake of the shootings by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

Speaking in Brussels at a conference on Palestinian refugees, Ashton said: “When we remember what happened in Toulouse today, when you remember what happened when I was in Norway last week a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when you see what has happened in Gaza and Sderot, in different parts of the world, we remember young people and children who lose their lives.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in responce: “What gets me especially incensed is the comparison between the targeted slaughter of children, including the finishing off of a girl, and the surgical, defensive activities of the Israel Defence Forces that are meant to hit terrorists who use children for human shields.”

UPDATE:
French police were trying Wednesday to negotiate the surrender of a suspected Islamist militant holed up in a flat after shootings that left seven dead, including three Jewish children.

UPDATE: Wednesday, March 21
French authorities denied a TV report that said the main suspect in the shooting attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse was arrested.

The standoff with police that began at 3 a.m. Wednesday outside the Toulouse home of Mohammed Merah, a 24-year-old French national of Algerian descent who claims ties to al-Qaida was continuing, they said.

Merah reportedly has been known to French intelligence for many years.

On Wednesday morning, thousands attended the funeral in Jerusalem of the attack’s four victims two days earlier.

French police surrounded Merah’s home in the morning. Merah, in contact with the police, reportedly had agreed to turn himself later in the day before abruptly cutting off communication with police. The suspect’s brother, and possibly other siblings, reportedly had been arrested, and two police officers were injured in a shootout outside the home, according to reports.

The Ozar Hatorah school reopened Wednesday for the first time since the attack, in which a man riding a motorbike opened fire Monday outside the school where students were waiting to enter the building at the start of the school day.

Update: Thursday, 10 am
AP
An Islamic extremist who boasted of killing seven people to strike back at France died Thursday after jumping from his window, gun in hand, in a fierce shootout with police, a French minister said.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the suspect, who claimed links to al-Qaida, jumped out after police entered the apartment Thursday and found him holed up in the bathroom.

The death of Mohamed Merah, 23, ended a more than 32-hour standoff with an elite police squad trying to capture him alive. Merah was wanted in the deaths of seven people, three paratroopers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi, all killed over 10 days. Another student and another paratrooper were wounded in his attacks.

Police said, during hours of negotiations Wednesday when the standoff first began, Merah admitted to being proud of the seven slayings he carried out in three motorcycle shooting attacks around the southwestern city of Toulouse. They are believed to be the first killings inspired by Islamic radical motives in France in more than a decade.

Authorities said Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent, espoused a radical form of Islam and had been to Afghanistan and the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan, where he claimed to have received training from al-Qaida.

Elite police squads set off sporadic blasts throughout the night and into the morning – some blew off the apartment’s shutters – in what officials described as a tactic aimed to pressure Merah to give up. A new set of detonations, known as flash bangs, resounded at 10:30 a.m. (0930 GMT), portending the end to the standoff.

“The killer came out of the bathroom, firing with extreme violence,” Gueant said, adding that the RAID squad had “never seen an assault like it.”

The volley of gunfire resounded throughout the neighborhood Thursday morning, and two police officers were wounded in the firefight.

Gueant said police “went in by the door, taking off the door first. They also came in by the windows.”

He said police used special video equipment to search the second-floor apartment but found him nowhere, until the special instruments surveyed the bathroom.

“The killer came out” firing “with extreme violence,” Gueant told reporters. Police “tried to protect themselves and fired back.”

“Mohamed Merah jumped out the window, gun in hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground,” Gueant said.

Gueant earlier had said police wanted to capture Merah alive.
Holed up alone in an otherwise evacuated apartment building, Merah clung to his few remaining assets, like a small arsenal and authorities’ hopes of taking him alive. On Wednesday, he appeared to toy with police negotiators – first saying he would surrender in the afternoon, then saying he would surrender under the cover of darkness, then reneging on those pledges altogether.