France shooting: French killer makes last stand in hail of 30 bullets

AN ISLAMIC extremist suspected of killing seven people was shot dead by police as he leapt from the window of his flat with a gun in his hand. A masked French police team had slipped into the apartment, sparking a firefight that ended a 32-hour siege.

The suspect, Mohamed Merah, 23, was wanted over the deaths of three French paratroopers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi – all killed since 11 March. Merah reportedly told police it was an attempt to “bring France to its knees”.

Police had been trying to capture him alive since surrounding his apartment on Wednesday in the city of Toulouse.

The killings he was accused of – and boasted about to police – have shocked France, ignited fear in moderate Muslims about stoking discrimination and may even affect the country’s forthcoming presidential election.

The seven murders, carried out in three motorcycle shooting attacks, are believed to be the first killings inspired by Islamic radical motives in France since the attacks of 11 September, 2001.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said an investigation was under way to see whether Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent who claimed links to al-Qaeda, had any accomplices.

His mother and a brother were detained on Wednesday after her computer became a critical link in tracking down Merah. The brother, Abdelkader, had already been linked to Iraqi Islamist networks.

Prosecutor Francois Molins said Merah had burst out of his bathroom when police carefully entered his flat, wildly firing his gun about 30 times before jumping from a window.

“[He] launches an assault, charging police through the apartment and firing at them with a Colt 45, continuing to advance, armed and firing, as he jumps from the balcony,” Mr Molins said.

Merah fired “until he was hit by a retaliatory shot from the RAID [elite police unit], which felled him with a bullet to the head”.

The prosecutor said police fired in self-defence after going in cautiously through the front door, using robot cameras to see if there were booby traps. Three members of the squad were wounded, taking the number of injured French officers throughout the stand-off to five.

Merah, lying on the ground below his second-storey flat, was wearing a flak jacket and black djellabah robe. A Colt 45 – the type of weapon used in the three attacks – was at his side along with a sack.

Authorities said Merah 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-Qaeda. He also had a long record of petty crime, for which he had served time in jail.

Elite police squads had set off sporadic blasts throughout the night and into the morning – some blew off the apartment’s shutters – to pressure him to give up. A new set of detonations, known as flash bangs, resounded at 10:30am. Volleys of gunfire were heard an hour later.

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

He said they used special video equipment to search the second-floor apartment but could not find him until the instruments surveyed the bathroom.

“The killer came out [firing] with extreme violence” Mr Gueant said. Police “tried to protect themselves and fired back”.

Merah had made “extremely explicit films” of all three deadly attacks – video since viewed by police – and claimed to have posted them online.

In the film of the 11 March attack that killed a paratrooper, the prosecutor said the gunman is heard saying: “You kill my brothers – I kill you.”

In his film of the second attack, on 15 March, that killed two paratroopers and wounded a third in nearby Montauban, Merah cried out “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great”).

Authorities spoke little about the video of Merah slaying a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. But one witness to the video of that rampage has described him shooting children in the head.

Merah told negotiators he had killed to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest at the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan. He was also upset over a French government ban on face-covering Islamic veils.

The state prosecutor said on-off negotiations on Wednesday – all recorded by the authorities – broke down again at night. Merah, after saying he would surrender, later said he would resist, and that it would be either them or him. “If it’s me, who cares? I’ll go to paradise,” he said.

Mr Molins said Merah had told them where to find the bag with the videos of the killings, caught by a camera that had been strapped to his chest, and given to someone else to keep.

After the stand-off ended, Mr Sarkozy announced tough new measures to combat terrorism.

He also appealed to citizens not to link violence to France’s five million Muslims. “Our Muslim compatriots had nothing to do with the crazy motive of a terrorist,” Mr Sarkozy said, noting Muslim paratroopers had been among those killed by Merah.