French police were preparing to storm an apartment building in Toulouse yesterday if a gunman suspected in seven killings and claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda does not surrender, a top police official said.
Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said the suspect had promised to turn himself into police shortly. Delage said if that does not happen, police would force their way in to arrest him.
The suspect told police he belonged to al-Qaeda and wanted to take revenge for Palestinian children killed in the Middle East, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said, adding the man also said he was angry about French military intervention abroad.
Photo: EPA
Hundreds of police surrounded the building in the southwestern city of Toulouse after three officers were wounded while trying to arrest the 24-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, who authorities said had spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
An Interior Ministry official identified the suspect as Mohammad Merah, who has been under surveillance for years for having “fundamentalist” views. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
After hours of trying to persuade him to surrender, police evacuated the five-story building, escorting residents out using the roof and fire truck ladders.
The raid was part of France’s biggest manhunt since a wave of terrorist attacks in the 1990s by Algerian extremists and it revived memories of the fear that gripped the country at the time.
The manhunt began after France’s worst-ever school shooting on Monday and last week’s attacks on paratroopers, a series of killings that have horrified the country.
French authorities have been following several leads, but they said the man holed up in the Toulouse apartment building is their key suspect. The suspect threw a Colt .45 handgun used in each of the three attacks out a window in exchange for a device to talk to authorities, but he has more weapons, such as an AK-47 assault rifle, authorities said. Gueant said other weapons had been found in the suspect’s car.
There was some confusion over the suspect’s background, because a person of the same name was arrested in southern Afghanistan five years ago and escaped from his prison cell in Kandahar Province in a 2008 mass jailbreak.
Police swept in soon after 3am on the residential neighborhood in Toulouse where the suspect was holed up. At one point, volleys of gunfire were exchanged.
The suspect promised several times to surrender in the afternoon, then stopped talking to negotiators, Gueant said. In the early afternoon, he resumed talking, a police official said.
“Terrorism will not be able to fracture our national community,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday on national television, before heading to the funeral services for two paratroopers killed in nearby Montauban.
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