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Massacre monster was held and freed by US in Afghanistan
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 The Muslim fanatic who cold-bloodedly assassinated three young children and a rabbi in a southern French city had been held by US forces in Afghanistan — but they quickly shipped him back to France, it was revealed yesterday.
During one of two trips to Afghanistan, Mohammed Merah was detained at a roadblock by Afghan cops and turned over to US soldiers, according to Francois Molins, a French prosecutor. Soon afterward, the United States washed its hands of him and “put him on the first plane headed to France,’’ Molins said.
Once in France, he was allowed to live freely in Toulouse, despite his known radical views.
It was not immediately clear why the Americans and French failed to detain him. Molins said Merah was suffering from hepatitis.
US officials are aiding the probe of why he was let go by both countries.
Merah — who was locked in a standoff with 300 French police officers last night — was well known to intelligence agencies long before he opened fire on a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday, sources said.
Throughout the siege, Merah, 23, kept boasting to the cops, while brandishing an AK-47. He bragged about committing the murders at the school and also confessed to the fatal shootings of three French soldiers in two earlier attacks, officials said.
“He said he had planned to attack a solider on Monday but, unable to find a target, he took aim at the Jewish school,” said Claude Guéant, the French interior minister. He added that Merah had planned more attacks.
“He expressed no regret, apart from not having had enough time to kill more victims, and even boasted of having brought France to its knees,” Molins said. Read more here.
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French gun suspect 'wants to die'
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French police have surrounded an armed man at a flat in Toulouse, suspecting him of carrying out three gun attacks that left seven people dead and two wounded.
Mohammed Merah, 23, a French citizen of Algerian extraction, is said to have told police he wanted to avenge Palestinian children, and attack the French army because of its foreign interventions.
Each shooting was apparently carried out by a single gunman on a scooter, using the same gun, striking in daylight.
The attacks took place in Toulouse and the town of Montauban, 45km (30 miles) away.
Soldiers were targeted in the first two shootings, but the third took place at a Jewish school, where children were shot along with a teacher.
Cyber trail
The same pistol, thought to be a Colt 45, was used in all three shootings
It is reported that Mohammed Merah threw out a Colt 45 during negotiations with police at the flat, hours into the siege which began early on 21 March.
A Yamaha T-Max 500cc scooter stolen in the Toulouse area on 6 March was used in at least one attack.
The suspect sought out a garage in Toulouse to ask for advice on how to respray the scooter after the first two attacks, and this was a clue that helped police locate him.
He also apparently contacted a Yamaha dealer in Toulouse to ask how to deactivate the stolen scooter's GPS tracking device.
But the strongest clue to the gunman's identity may have been an email account used to contact the first victim.
Around 16:00 (15:00 GMT) on Sunday 11 March, Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant in the 1st Airborne Transportation Regiment, was shot dead behind the Chateau de l'Hers school in a quiet district of Toulouse. Read more here. |
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France gunman stays holed up, cops "waiting"
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(CBS/AP) TOULOUSE, France - Riot police set off explosions outside an apartment building early Thursday in an effort to force the surrender of a gunman who boasted of bringing France "to its knees" with an al Qaeda-linked terror spree that killed seven people.
French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said Thursday morning that it was "unclear" whether the suspect was even still alive. He had not contacted negotiators since Wednesday night, raising suspicions that he may have committed suicide.
The suspect, 24-year-old Mohamed Merah, wants to "die with weapons in his hands," said Gueant.
Hundreds of heavily armed police, some in body armor, surrounded the five-story building in Toulouse where Merah had been holed up since the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday.
As midnight approached, three explosions were heard and orange flashes lit up the night sky near the building. An Interior Ministry official said the suspect had gone back on a previous pledge to turn himself in — and that police blew up the shutters outside the apartment window to pressure him to surrender.
Sporadic blasts and bursts of gunfire rang out throughout the night, though officials insisted no full-out assault was under way. "It's not as simple as that. We are waiting," the Toulouse prosecutor, Michel Valet, told The Associated Press.
Authorities said the shooter, a French citizen of Algerian descent, had been to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he claimed to have received training from al Qaeda. Read more here. |
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The Jihad in France
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Posted By Michel Gurfinkiel On March 21, 2012 @ 11:05 am I
Midi-Pyrénées, the region in southwestern France stretching from Massif Central — the dark, wooded mountains of Auvergne, Rouergue, and Quercy — to the spacious Toulouse Valley and the Pyrenean cordillera on the Spanish border, was, since March 19, under “scarlet” alert: the closest France comes to martial law.
The army and police patrolled the entire area. Vehicles were subject to inspection at will. Police could half traffic without prior warning. Schools, shops, offices, and factories could be shut down by order and citizens required to stay home. Twenty-five sharpshooters from Raid had been dispatched from Paris. And naturally, telephone and internet connections were extensively monitored. No small matter considering that Greater Toulouse, the region’s capital and the seat of Airbus and other major industrial companies, is France’s fourth largest city with over one million inhabitants. In fact, this was the first time since the introduction in 1995 of Vigipirate, the French equivalent of Homeland Security, that France resorted to such drastic measures.
A chilling succession of killings in Toulouse and Montauban, an important military center one hundred miles away, triggered the “scarlet” alert.
The killing spree began on March 11, when a NCO of Maghrebine descent from the Montauban-based 17th Paratroopers Engineer Regiment, was drawn into a trap and shot in Toulouse. According to one witness, the attacker dressed as a motorbiker. Then, on March 15, three soldiers from the same unit — two Maghrebines and one Caribbean — were shot in Montauban while stopped at an ATM. The aggressor rode a motorbike and wore a leather outfit and opaque helmet. And finally, on March 19, another biker in full motorcylce gear — or possibly the same one — attacked the Jewish Ozar Hatora school complex in Toulouse. He first randomly fired at the parents, children, and teachers in the school’s courtyard before stepping down from his bike to kill four people in cold blood: 30 year-old religion teacher Jonathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gabriel (5 and 4), and a 7-year-old girl, Myriam Monsenego, whom he grabbed by the hair to lodge a bullet in her head. He then jumped back on his bike and vanished from the massacre.
According to French Interior Minister Claude Guéant, the similarities between the assassination of soldiers in Toulouse and Montauban and the eerie butchery at Ozar Hatora were “compelling.” Moreover, investigators established that the criminal used the same weapon, a World War II 11.43 gun, in all three instances. What remained unclear, according to police, was the number of killers and whether they had received support from a larger criminal network. Motive also remained a mystery.
For 48 hours, many speculated about a neo-Nazi psychopath, some sort of French Tim McVeigh or Anders Breivik. What seemed to encourage this view was the fact that the shooter targeted only non-Caucasian soldiers and Jews and that a neo-Nazi network had been investigated and prosecuted among the Montauban military four years ago.
In fact, the police already knew their suspect: one single killer, a jihadist. The man — Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin — was not even hiding. Confident that police sought a neo-Nazi, he stayed at his unassuming home in Toulouse. Tuesday evening, the Raid huntsmen and dozens of other police personnel circled the building. At 3:00 AM they tried to apprehend him alive. He fired on them, wounding two. By 6:00 PM local time, the police expect him to surrender soon.
According to various sources, Merah is primarily a thief who grew radicalized by jihadists while incarcerated. After jail he traveled to Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan, where he received first class combat training. While negotiating with the police on Wednesday, he claimed to belong to al-Qaeda. That may be true or not. Little doubt remains, however, that his systematic murders of French soldiers (especially Muslim French soldiers, seen as renegades) and Jews (including children) fit with jihadist and al-Qaeda ideology, strategy, and tactics.
One month ahead of the presidential election, the French political class wanted to both draw on the emotional impact of the killings and avoid gaffes or politically incorrect statements. All presidential candidates expressed their shock and anger about the deliberate killing of Jewish children. Most attended Jewish services in Paris and Toulouse. President Sarkozy suspended his campaign for three days and his rivals did the same. On the other hand, Sarkozy warned against “amalgamating” the “peaceful and law abiding Muslim community” with jihadists and other radicals, or “calling for retribution.” Many other candidates, or national leaders, said the same.
Such attitudes displease French Jews. For one thing, they know that if all Muslims are not jihadists, jihadism and other extremist movements still spread among French Muslims, especially the younger, French-born, generation. Conversely, they believe that their own global image and condition have steadily deteriorated for years and that this explains at least in part the torturing and killing of Ilan Halimi in 2006 and the Toulouse massacre today.
According to Sammy Ghozlan, a former police superintendent and the head of a French antisemitism monitoring group, street violence against Jews is increasing, and is largely perpetrated by Muslim thugs. (Just one week ago, a Jewish high school student was beaten at Porte de Bagnolet in Paris, until he was rescued by horrified witnesses.) The so called BDS campaign (anti-Israel boycott), while illegal, gains ground and grows more violent. It is not uncommon for BDS activists to “occupy” stores that sell Israeli products or bookshops that sell pro-Israel literature and to dump or damage the items, a practice reminiscent of the SA, anti-Jewish boycott in the 1930s. One hears “Death to Jews” mottos frequently in Muslim-populated areas. Such cries sounded last month in Champigny, near Paris, upon the release of a comedy about Sefardi Jews, La Vérité si je mens 3. Read more here.
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The Victims
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Toulouse victims buried in Israel
The three children and teacher killed by a gunman in Toulouse have been buried in Jerusalem.
They all had dual French and Israeli citizenship - their bodies were laid to rest in Israel at the families' request.
There were emotional scenes as relatives and hundreds of mourners arrived at the Givat Shaul cemetery.
The children and the rabbi were killed on Monday morning as they arrived at the Ozar Hatorah school.
In the French city of Toulouse police have been laying siege to a flat where they are negotiating with the man suspected of carrying out the shooting.
He is Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who says he belongs to al-Qaeda and wanted to "avenge Palestinian children".
'Israel weeps'
At the cemetery the victims, Jonathan Sandler, 30, his sons Arieh, five, and Gabriel, four, were wrapped in a white prayer shawls while seven-year-old Myriam Monsonego was wrapped in a blue and gold shroud for burial.
The BBC's Rupert Wingfield Hayes in Jerusalem says the most distressing sight was of Myriam's grief-stricken mother, unable to walk, being carried to the side of her dead child. Read more here.
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Toulouse school shootings traumatise French Jews
Many Jewish children in France have been afraid to go to school since the shootings that killed four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday.
Outside a Jewish school in Paris, police armed with sub-machine guns kept watch as anxious parents dropped off their children.
"It's difficult to imagine anybody running after a child and putting a bullet through their head," says Maya, a young Jewish mother.
"In Toulouse, the Jewish community was targeted, but I believe everybody should be concerned."
The attack at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, where three Jewish children and a teacher were among the dead, has stunned the nation.
Three soldiers of north African descent were also killed in separate attacks just days earlier. Read more here.
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