This guy was nuts:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy says an investigation is under way to see if the suspect in a series of radical Islam-inspired killings had any accomplices.
Sarkozy also said that anyone who regularly visits “websites which support terrorism or call for hate or violence will be punished by the law.” He promised a crackdown on anyone who goes abroad “for the purposes of indoctrination in terrorist ideology.”
He spoke soon after Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman, died after a 32-hour standoff with police in the southern city of Toulouse.
Merah was suspected of killing three schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers. He had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan for training.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
TOULOUSE, France (AP) — An Islamic extremist who boasted of killing seven people to strike back at France died Thursday after jumping from his window, gun in hand, in a fierce shootout with police, a French minister said.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the suspect, who claimed links to al-Qaida, jumped out after police entered the apartment Thursday and found him holed up in the bathroom.
The death of Mohamed Merah, 23, ended a more than 32-hour standoff with an elite police squad trying to capture him alive. Merah was wanted in the deaths of seven people, three paratroopers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi, all killed over 10 days. Another student and another paratrooper were wounded in his attacks.
Police said, during hours of negotiations Wednesday when the standoff first began, Merah admitted to being proud of the seven slayings he carried out in three motorcycle shooting attacks around the southwestern city of Toulouse. They are believed to be the first killings inspired by Islamic radical motives in France in more than a decade.
Authorities said Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent, espoused a radical form of Islam and had been to Afghanistan and the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan, where he claimed to have received training from al-Qaida.
Elite police squads set off sporadic blasts throughout the night and into the morning — some blew off the apartment’s shutters — in what officials described as a tactic aimed to pressure Merah to give up. A new set of detonations, known as flash bangs, resounded at 10:30 a.m. (0930 GMT), portending the end to the standoff.
“The killer came out of the bathroom, firing with extreme violence,” Gueant said, adding that the RAID squad had “never seen an assault like it.”
The volley of gunfire resounded throughout the neighborhood Thursday morning, and two police officers were wounded in the firefight.
Gueant said police “went in by the door, taking off the door first. They also came in by the windows.”
He said police used special video equipment to search the second-floor apartment but found him nowhere, until the special instruments surveyed the bathroom.
“The killer came out” firing “with extreme violence,” Gueant told reporters. Police “tried to protect themselves and fired back.”
“Mohamed Merah jumped out the window, gun in hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground,” Gueant said.
Gueant said the suspect had told the police Wednesday night that he would not surrender and that he would kill police if they try to arrest him.
That was the turning point in the decision to move in, the minister said.
Holed up alone in an otherwise evacuated apartment building, Merah clung to his few remaining assets, like a small arsenal and authorities’ hopes of taking him alive. On Wednesday, he appeared to toy with police negotiators — first saying he would surrender in the afternoon, then saying he would surrender under the cover of darkness, then reneging on those pledges altogether.
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