TOULOUSE: French police laid siege on Wednesday to an apartment block where a self-declared Al Qaeda militant who has claimed a series of deadly attacks on troops and Jewish children was holed up.
Prosecutors said Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had fought off several police assaults on his flat and bragged to negotiators of having been trained by Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
“He expressed no regret apart from not having had enough time to kill more victims and even boasted of having brought France to its knees,” France’s top anti-terror prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters.
Molins said Merah had claimed responsibility for three cold-blooded shootings over the previous 10 days in which three French paratroopers, three Jewish children and a teacher were killed, shocking the nation.
But he said he was not seeking to be a martyr and would give himself up later. He claimed to be avenging Palestinian deaths and opposing the French military’s involvement in Afghanistan and France’s ban on full-face veils.
Molins said the suspect had shot and wounded two elite officers after police first raided the apartment building in the city of Toulouse before dawn.
“Mohamed Merah explained that he belonged to Al Qaeda. He explained he had been trained by Al Qaeda in the Pakistani-Afghanistan region in Waziristan,” Molins told reporters in Toulouse, scene of two of the shootings.
Molins said the suspect had gone to the region twice using his own resources and on one occasion had been arrested by Afghan police and handed over to US army troops, who put him on a flight back to France.
Police and prosecutors said they had arrested Merah’s mother, brother and his brother’s girlfriend as part of the inquiry.
Sources said the suspect had been known to the domestic security service for some years.
After the failed police assault on the first floor flat in Toulouse where Merah was living, the two sides settled down to an armed siege. After nine hours other residents were evacuated from the building.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the suspect was thought to be armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a Mini-Uzi 9mm machine pistol and other handguns, but had thrown out a pistol used in the seven murders.
Meanwhile, French authorities did not say whether they were aware that Merah had been training with militants before the attacks in France or if they learned of the training after they closed in on him.
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 Taliban jailbreak, according to Kandahar provincial spokesman Ahmad Jawed Faisal.
However, Faisal says their records also show that Merah was an Afghan citizen from Kandahar province. —Agencies