A HUGE manhunt was under way for a serial killer in southern France last night after police linked yesterday’s killing of a teacher and three children at a Jewish school to the shooting dead of three soldiers last week.
A gunman on a motorbike shot dead Jonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old French-Israeli rabbi, and his two sons, aged four and five, as they arrived at school in a residential part of Toulouse yesterday morning. Another child, the eight-year-old daughter of the school’s principal, died in her father’s arms as medics tried to resuscitate her.
Ballistics tests showed a .45 calibre weapon fired during the school attack was used to kill three soldiers – one of Caribbean and two of North African origin – in two separate incidents in the region last week. The soldiers were also shot dead by a lone gunman on a motorbike.
In a nationally televised address last night, President Nicolas Sarkozy said the terror alert in the Midi-Pyrénées region had been raised to its highest level. This allows the authorities to close schools, ground aircraft and shut down public transport.
Witnesses at the Ozar Hatorah school said the gunman pulled up on a black scooter at 8.10am and began shooting at an area which serves as the drop-off point for younger children. “This man alighted from his moped and, as he was outside the school, he shot at everybody who was near him, children or adults. Children were chased right into the school,” public prosecutor Michel Valet told journalists.
The attacker pursued a child through the gate, grabbed her by the hair and shot her at close range, witnesses said.
“We’re afraid for our children. We bring them to school every day thinking nothing can happen,” said Ethel Guedj, who had dropped her two sons off at the school 20 minutes before the attack.
“My son told me, ‘we came out because we thought we heard fireworks. Then they saw the killings and were made to run inside.” The attack was the worst on Jews in France since August 1982, when six people were killed in a grenade attack in a Jewish neighbourhood in central Paris. France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community is Europe’s largest.
All the candidates in the presidential election suspended campaigning, and both Mr Sarkozy and François Hollande, his socialist challenger, flew to Toulouse.
“This tragedy has left the entire national community distraught,” Mr Sarkozy said at the scene. He called the killings “a national tragedy” and said his interior minister would remain in Toulouse until the killer was caught.
Police reopened the street facing the school last night, allowing neighbours to place flowers beneath a corrugated iron fence pierced by six bullet holes, each one numbered by police.
Inside, friends and family comforted the rabbi’s widow and prayed in a synagogue attached to the school. “I feel such pain for that mother – to lose her husband and two children in a matter of seconds,” Ms Guedj said.
“You don’t do that to a child. He doesn’t deserve to live.” Security was stepped up at schools and religious buildings in the region and police reinforcements were deployed to hunt down the gunman.
A moment of silence will be observed in all French schools today. “This is not just one school, Jews, or just one city which have been affected, but all of France,” said Mr Hollande.
More than 200 officers joined the investigation, with a heavy police presence in evidence around the city. Investigators were studying video evidence from the school shooting and the attack on Thursday in the nearby town of Montauban that killed two soldiers and left a third seriously injured.
The three men, aged between 24 and 28, were shot while in uniform as they queued to withdraw money from a cash machine close to the barracks of the 17th parachute regiment.
A third soldier, aged 30, was killed the previous weekend while out of uniform in Toulouse.
