Police raid shooter's house in Toulouse
In breaking news (which is still ongoing), the terrorist who attacked the Jewish school in Toulouse is being apprehended in an armed stand-off.And it turns out that he is indeed one of the “usual suspects” after all, admitting that he belongs to Al Qaeda.
French police forces raided a house in Toulouse where a 24-year-old man, a French national of Algerian decent and possibly linked to al-Qaeda, is holed up. He is suspected in the murder of four people, including three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday. The suspect’s brother was arrested. Three police officers were injured in a shoot-out.
A police source said the raid began at 3 am local time (0200 GMT) and was ongoing. Sky News reported that negotiations with the suspect have failed and that officers are preparing to storm the house.
The suspect claims to be linked to al-Qaeda, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
“He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al-Qaeda,” Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.
He also said the man had been in Afghanistan. “He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions,” Gueant said.
…
Officers brought the suspect’s mother to the scene and tried to get her to help negotiate, but she refused, saying “she had little influence on him,” Gueant said.
…
Heavily armed police in bullet-proof vests and helmets cordoned off the residential area where the raid was taking place, in a leafy suburb close to the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school where Monday’s shootings took place.
The France 24 network reported that the suspect is cooperating with the police.
Meanwhile, the bodies of the four victims landed at the Ben-Gurion Airport on Wednesday morning. They will be buried at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem at 10 am on Wednesday.
Earlier fears that three discharged neo-Nazi French soldiers were responsible for the murders turned out to be unfounded when they were all located and cleared of suspicion.
It’s going to be interesting to watch the reactions from both left and right as the identity of the terrorist murderer becomes clear.
Anne's Opinions 
Know the perpetrators by their targets. Of course Al-Qaeda would pursue 3 yr.-old victims–it’s their only way to guarantee “victory”. And let’s not forget that any blood of Palestinian children is equally on the Muslims’ hands, because they deliberately stockpile their weapons, missile batteries, and terrorists in their midst to bring about the children’s deaths when the terrorists fire on Israeli civilians, instigating Israeli retaliation.
Anti antisemitism has no place in the world today,
According to World Jewish Daily:
Toulouse Killer Likely Filmed Attack, Executed Little Girl
“A tragic update to a tragic story.
Police now say the killer of four Jews in Toulouse likely filmed the attack with a a camera attached to his chest and methodically stalked his victims, murdering a little girl in cold blood.
According to eyewitness accounts, after the killer entered the Jewish Ozar HaTorah school, he chased after 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego and shot her repeatedly.
He grabbed Miriam as she tried to escape, grasped her hair and shot her. Then, as she bled to death on the floor, he lifted up her head and fired two additional bullets.
The brutality of the crime — which also took the lives of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, and his two sons, Gabriel, 6, and Arieh, 3, — has led French police to suspect a violent, racist intent behind the attacks.
In a bizarre and macbre development, French police also say the killer seems to have filmed the attacks”
I was just reading a linked article on Drudge which said “He had been under surveillance by French intelligence for years, the interior minister said.”
So he had been under surveillance but they couldn’t stop this massacre?
Yeah, I was asking myself the same question.
Anne wrote: “It’s going to be interesting to watch the reactions from both left and right as the identity of the terrorist murderer becomes clear.”
It would seem the media is already going into apologist mode:
http://edgar1981.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/toulouse-killer-is-muslim-terrorist-so.html – a sickening response but one that is to be expected.
Thanks for that excellent link Rob. I was trying to formulate my thoughts on this exact subject and Edgar Davidson has said it all so eloquently and accurately.
Here is an update:
Merah has spent considerable time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gueant said. Merah was sent back from Afghanistan to France by the U.S. Army, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said in Toulouse Wednesday. He said Afghan police had checked Merah’s identification during a traffic stop, and as a result he was handed over to the U.S. Army, which then put him on board the first plane heading to France.
But a senior U.S. military official gave a different version from the French prosecutor about what happened to the suspect in Afghanistan.
The senior U.S. military official told the CNN contributor Fran Townsend that the French shooting suspect was stopped by Afghan forces who tried to turn him over to the U.S. military. The U.S. directed them to hand Merah to French forces since he was a citizen of their country. He was given over the French military by the Afghans and the French military decided to return him to France, according to the source.
I hope the latter is true, I would hate to think that we would just send him back to France with no consequences.
Apparently the terrorist spent time in jail in Afghanistan and was sprung from there by a Taliban raid. It’s not clear how he then got back to France. See Cifwatch’s article for more.
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