A 23-YEAR-OLD suspected of killing seven people in southwest France was shot dead in a gun battle with police commandos yesterday, bringing to an end a 32-hour siege and one of the biggest security operations in recent French history.
Mohamed Merah, a French citizen, died from a gunshot wound to the head after armed police carried out an assault on his apartment in a residential neighbourhood of Toulouse. He had confessed to killing three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi.
The assault began at 11.25am, when two loud explosions rang out across the Côte Pavée neighbourhood, followed by a ferocious gun battle that lasted six minutes.
Interior minister Claude Guéant said that when members of a special forces unit entered the apartment, Merah burst through the bathroom door firing with “extreme violence”. The police used stun grenades and other non-lethal weapons, hoping to capture the suspect alive, the public prosecutor said.
However, Merah then jumped through his first-floor window, while still firing, and was shot in the head by a sniper outside. The prosecutor, François Molins, said police had been told to fire live rounds only in self-defence. Merah fired 30 times, he said. Two police commandos were injured, though their injuries were not reported to be life-threatening.
Mr Molins said Merah had taken refuge in his bathroom, wearing a bullet-proof vest under his traditional black djellaba robe, and had burst through the door when police sent in a video probe.
Police had been told to do everything possible to take Merah alive but had no choice when he opened fire “at an incredible rate”, Mr Molins said. “He literally launched an assault, rushing forward with a Colt .45 and continuing to fire as he jumped through the window, until he was shot in the head.”
The killings in Toulouse over the past 10 days horrified France and led to the virtual suspension of the presidential election campaign. It led to one of the largest manhunts ever in the country and the raising of the terror alert to its highest level for the first time.
Merah told police negotiators he had carried out the killings to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and because of the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan. He had planned to kill his next targets – another soldier and two police officers – as early as yesterday, said Mr Molins.
Merah claimed to have been trained by al-Qaeda in Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan. The prosecutor said he had gone to the region twice, and on one occasion was picked up by Afghan police and handed over to US army troops, who put him on a flight back to France.
Merah was interviewed by intelligence officers last November but told them he had travelled to Afghanistan for tourism. The interior ministry said he had a police record for minor offences, but there was no evidence he belonged formally to any group or was planning murders.
Yesterday two American officials said Merah had been added to a US watch list some time ago but would not disclose why. At the time of his capture in Afghanistan, according to two other officials, he had been held in custody by US forces.
Within hours of the shoot-out, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a crackdown on extremist websites, saying anyone who “habitually consulted” sites that advocated terrorism or called for hate or violence would be punished: “France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil.”
Anyone who travelled abroad for “indoctrination into ideologies which lead to terrorism” would be prosecuted, and an inquiry would be carried out into whether French prisons were being used to propagate extremism.
Leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities called for calm, pointing out the gunman was a lone extremist.
