A self-proclaimed al Qaeda militant died in a hail of bullets on Thursday as he jumped out of an apartment window at the end of a 32-hour siege in southern France.
Mohamed Merah, the main suspect in a wave of shootings that killed seven people, had tried to blast his way out of the siege in the city of Toulouse after members of an elite force known as RAID entered his flat. But Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the 23-year-old had been found dead on the ground in a dramatic end to the lengthy standoff.
“The killer came out from the bathroom shooting very violently. The bursts of gunfire were frequent and hard,” Gueant said. “A RAID officer who is used to this kind of thing told me that he had never seen such a violent assault. “RAID officers of course tried to protect themselves, to return fire, and then in the end, Mohamed Merah jumped out of the window with a gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground.” The exact cause of the death was not immediately clear. Merah’s flat was reportedly on the first floor above the ground floor.
Sustained bursts of gunfire had been heard outside the apartment shortly after sources told AFP police were moving “rapidly” to end the siege, but progressing “step by step” through the apartment in fear of booby traps. A total of around 300 shots were fired. Three loud explosions near the apartment were heard shortly before police said the officers had moved in, and an ambulance was then seen passing through a security cordon.
Merah had been holed up since Tuesday night after being tracked down by police as the main suspect in a wave of shootings that killed seven people, including three soldiers and three Jewish children. Gueant had earlier said police had lost contact with Merah but that he had told authorities he wanted “to die weapons in hand”. Prosecutors said Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, had fought off several police assaults on the flat on Wednesday and bragged to negotiators of having been trained by Al-Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Sarkozy vows to crack down on extremist indoctrination
French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed on Thursday to crack down on extremist indoctrination in the wake of the murder of seven people by a self-proclaimed Islamist militant. He said he wanted legal action against people who regularly consulted jihadist websites or who travelled abroad for indoctrination and said he wanted to stop French jails being a breeding ground for extremism. “Henceforth, any person who habitually consults Internet sites which praise terrorism and which call for hatred and violence will be punished under criminal law,” he said in a televised address. Any person who travels abroad for “indoctrination into ideologies which lead to terrorism” will be prosecuted, Sarkozy said, shortly after the alleged killer of the seven was shot dead by police in Toulouse. The president added that he had asked his justice minister to investigate the propagation of extremist ideologies in French prisons.