REPORTING FROM PARIS — Two French police officers have been shot and injured in a standoff at an apartment in southwest France, where a man claiming to be a member of Al Qaeda and suspected of killing seven people — including a rabbi and three children — is holed up.
The standoff in Toulouse began at 3 a.m. Wednesday when police from an elite armed unit surrounded a building in a residential area of the city less than 48 hours after a gunman attacked a local Jewish school, killing four people…
French Interior Minister Claude Guéant said officers were under instructions to take the 24-year-old suspect alive. The man is of French nationality and Algerian origin. Multiple news agencies are identified the man as Mohammed Merah…
Those killed at the Ozar-Hatorah school were Jonathan Sandler, 31, a rabbi and teacher; his two sons, Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4; and Miriam Monsonego, 7, the daughter of the school’s headmaster. The gunman had chased the little girl into the school campus and executed her with a shot to the head.
If you’re wondering why this man picked a Jewish school as his target, or what his name or self-identification have to do with anything, you are a racist. This is yet another in a long line of completely unrelated attacks that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Nothing to see here, folks.
They’re under orders to take Merah alive, but that doesn’t mean he can’t fall down the stairs. Eight or nine times.
P.S. BBC News:
Mohammed Merah, the man believed to be the gunman on a scooter who killed seven people in south-western France, is a 24-year-old French citizen of Algerian extraction…
He had described himself as an Islamist warrior and member of the al-Qaeda network.
French news channel BFM TV said he was linked to Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride), an Islamist group banned last month in France…
According to Interior Minister Claude Gueant, the suspect made trips to both Afghanistan and Pakistan…
Mohammed Merah visited Pakistan twice, in 2010 and 2011, and was arrested at Kandahar in southern Afghanistan at the end of 2010. The Afghan authorities notified French police.
After the first two shootings, in Toulouse and Montauban, he was “in the sights” of France’s domestic intelligence service, the DCRI, along with others, an unnamed official told AFP news agency.
Good job keeping an eye on him.