Quote: Toulouse Shootingolice Hunt Dismissed Neo-Nazi Soldiers After Horrific Murders

Huffington Post UK | By Michael Rundle Posted: 20/03/2012 10:15 Updated: 20/03/2012 10:57
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Police in France are hunting three former soldiers [url=http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article4204448.ece]who were fired for joining a suspected neo-Nazi gang in connection with three shootings near Toulouse which have left seven people dead.
The men, described by French media as "muscular and tattooed", were dismissed in 2008 after they were pictured giving a Nazi salute in front of a swastika flag.
Police have linked the men to the shooting of three soldiers from their former regiment, the 17th Parachute Engineers, on 15 March. Two soldiers died in the attack and a third was critically injured.
France's Le Point news magazine said: "This is the first real lead the police have. [It is believed] there could be a link to the three soldiers dismissed from the army four years ago.
"The profile of these men corresponds to the scant information investigators have on the Toulouse killer, that is to say, muscular and tattooed.
"This lead is being followed up by both civilian and military authorities."
The shooting on 15 March followed another attack on 11 March, in which a soldierwas shot and killed outside a gym in Toulouse.

All of the soldiers were reported to have been black or of north African origin.
Four people including three childrenwere shot dead outside a Jewish school on Monday.
Police linked the school shooting to the attacks on soldiers because in all three attacks the gunman was reported to have ridden a black motorbike or scooter, and used either a 9mm pistol or a .45 calibre gun.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy said there were "similarities" between the shootings, but said the country must wait for police to carry out their investigations before the "hypothesis" could be confirmed.

Quote:Investigators say the killer is the same person who shot three French soldiers of north African and Caribbean origin in two other attacks in Toulouse and nearby Montauban last week. Three soldiers died and one was injured.

Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Magda - agreed, this looks neo-Nazi/racist in motivation rather than purely anti-semitic.

Quote:Investigators say the killer is the same person who shot three French soldiers of north African and Caribbean origin in two other attacks in Toulouse and nearby Montauban last week. Three soldiers died and one was injured.

Source.

I note that the extreme right is usually thoroughly penetrated by intelligence services.

I further note that small militarized cells, ordered to pursue a murderous Strategy of Tension, are usually created in right-wing dung.

Magda Hassan Wrote:The media seem to be running with this as an anti-Semitic attack but it has all the hallmarks of a fascist extreme right wing one.

Quote: Toulouse Shootingolice Hunt Dismissed Neo-Nazi Soldiers After Horrific Murders

Huffington Post UK | By Michael Rundle Posted: 20/03/2012 10:15 Updated: 20/03/2012 10:57




Police in France are hunting three former soldiers who were fired for joining a suspected neo-Nazi gang in connection with three shootings near Toulouse which have left seven people dead.
The men, described by French media as "muscular and tattooed", were dismissed in 2008 after they were pictured giving a Nazi salute in front of a swastika flag.
Police have linked the men to the shooting of three soldiers from their former regiment, the 17th Parachute Engineers, on 15 March. Two soldiers died in the attack and a third was critically injured.
France's Le Point news magazine said: "This is the first real lead the police have. [It is believed] there could be a link to the three soldiers dismissed from the army four years ago.
"The profile of these men corresponds to the scant information investigators have on the Toulouse killer, that is to say, muscular and tattooed.
"This lead is being followed up by both civilian and military authorities."
The shooting on 15 March followed another attack on 11 March, in which a soldierwas shot and killed outside a gym in Toulouse.

All of the soldiers were reported to have been black or of north African origin.
Four people including three childrenwere shot dead outside a Jewish school on Monday.
Police linked the school shooting to the attacks on soldiers because in all three attacks the gunman was reported to have ridden a black motorbike or scooter, and used either a 9mm pistol or a .45 calibre gun.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy said there were "similarities" between the shootings, but said the country must wait for police to carry out their investigations before the "hypothesis" could be confirmed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/20/toulouse-shooting-police-neo-nazis_n_1366386.html?ir=Canada&ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Quote:A gunman suspected of killing three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school wounded three police officers in a shoot-out at a house in Toulouse in southwestern France on Wednesday and said he was a member of al Qaeda.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the man targeted in the raid was a 24-year-old man who had visited Afghanistan and Pakistan, and had shot dead the four out of revenge for France's military involvement abroad. He is also suspected by authorities of having killed three soldiers of North African origin last week.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, campaigning for re-election in a presidential poll in five weeks time, has blamed racism for Monday's school attack. His handling of the crisis could be a decisive factor in determining how the French people vote.

"He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda," Gueant told journalists in Toulouse, referring to the gunman.

"He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to attack the French army because of its foreign intervention."

France has troops in Afghanistan as part of NATO forces.

Gueant did not say how they had tracked the man down, but that police were talking to his brother at a separate location in connection to the killings.

His mother had also been brought to the scene to help negotiate with the man, who is holed up in a small apartment building in the leafy neighborhood.

Heavily armed police in bullet-proof vests and helmets cordoned off the area where the raid was taking place, in a suburb a few kilometers from the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school where Monday's shootings took place.
Reuters witnesses heard several shots at about 0440 GMT.

A police source said the police could launch an assault if the standoff lasted for some time. "There are more and more people around, so this creates a dangerous situation."

Gueant said Sarkozy had been informed of the raid which began at 3:00 a.m. (0200 GMT). When he was the mayor of a upmarket Paris suburb, Sarkozy helped negotiate the end of a hostage crisis involving several children. It has been credited with boosting his political career.

Immigrants and Islam have been major themes of the campaign as Sarkozy tried to win over the voters of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Analysts say the shootings could transform the election debate and possibly tone down the populist rhetoric.

Jean Marc, a 56-year-old restaurant owner in the city who declined to give his last name, said he believed the crisis would benefit the far right or Sarkozy in the election.

"The Socialists don't talk about this stuff and it shows they don't know what they are doing," he said. "They (the police) need to get this guy."
Earlier on Wednesday, police sources told Reuters that a man had been arrested at a separate location in connection with the killings.
Authorities believe that the gunman in the school shooting was the same person responsible for killing three soldiers of North African origin in two shootings last week in Toulouse and the nearby town of Montauban.

The same Colt 45 handgun was used in all three attacks and in each case the gunman arrived on a Yamaha scooter with his face hidden by a motorcycle helmet.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Flynn and Geert de Clercq in Paris; writing by Daniel Flynn; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)

French Interior Minister: Police in Armed Stand-Off with Toulouse Shooting Suspect

Quote: As the Toulouse siege unfolded on Wednesday, a fuller picture was emerging of the young man behind one of France's worst killing sprees.

Some of the details remain contradictory, but it appears that Mohamed Merah, who shot a rabbi and three Jewish children dead at point-blank range, has a history of petty crime. An alleged former jihadi fighter, he was rejected by the French military two years ago.


On Wednesday morning he had been planning to kill again, he told negotiators, targeting a soldier he had already identified.


Most extraordinary was an almost certainly false claim that emerged during the armed siege of Merah's apartment block: that in 2008 he escaped in a mass jailbreak in Kandahar, where he had been arrested for bombmaking the previous year. The claim was denied by Afghan security sources. Merah does appear to have spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but later than 2007.


Growing up in a poor neighbourhood in north Toulouse, on the surface Merah seemed typical of many whose families had immigrated a generation or two before from north Africa to France. He was keen on football and enthusiastic about scooters.


Eric Lambert, 46, whose son was an upstairs neighbour in his apartment block, described Merah as friendly and "extremely normal", and said he had helped about 10 months ago to carry a heavy sofa upstairs.


A group of four young men claiming to be friends of Merah, who arrived at a police roadblock close to the besieged building on Wednesday to persuade him to surrender, denied knowledge of his extremist views, despite the revelation that Merah had been under surveillance since returning from Afghanistan. They told a Reuters reporter that their friend never talked to them about religion, and they had no idea he had been to Afghanistan.

One, who gave his name as Kamal and said he was a financial adviser at La Banque Postale, said he had known Merah at school and they had been to football training together after meeting again two years ago.


"He is someone who is very discreet. He is not someone who would brag and go around and say: 'Oh look at my new girlfriend, look how great I am.' He is very polite and always well-behaved," Kamal said. "He never spoke about Islam, but he did pray. But we all pray five times a day … When you know a person well you just can't believe they could have done something like this."


Another friend, a man of Moroccan origin who gave the pseudonym Danny Dem, confirmed reports that Merah tried to enlist in the French army but was rejected. He said he had seen Merah in a nightclub in the city centre last week.


It appears there was another side to Merah unknown to his acquaintances. Like his brother, who was arrested during the manhunt, Merah has a criminal record including a violent crime, and is said to be an adherent of Salafism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. Police found weapons and explosives in his brother's car.
According to Christian Etelin, a lawyer who represented Merah in a court case for driving without a licence in February, Merah's mother and his elder sister, to whom he was close somewhat despaired of him. France's interior minister, Claude Guéant, put it more strongly, describing how Merah's mother had declined to help police by speaking to her besieged son.


"His mother said she did not wish to speak to him because she did not believe she could convince him and he would be deaf to her appeals," he said.
Guéant said Merah had "explained a lot about his agenda" to police negotiators. "His radicalisation took place in a Salafist ideological group and seems to have been firmed up by two journeys he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan."


Etelin told French television that Merah knew he had been under surveillance by the French secret service since returning from Afghanistan, but was "extremely discreet about his political views". He described Merah as "by no means rigid or fanatical", and said he could never imagine him committing crimes of such "hardness and extremity … If you could say anything, it was that he was polite and courteous … quite sweet actually".


But Etelin described a darker side to Merah, who he said was imprisoned at 18 for snatching a bag in the entrance hall of a bank. "Unlike a lot of others who grew up alongside him in that area in the north of the city, he was not involved in drugs. His thing was petty theft," he said.


It appears that Merah, like more than 1,000 other young French citizens, found himself drawn to the jihadist cause in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By his own account, in reported conversations with French police negotiators and a France 24 journalist whom he reportedly called during the siege, it was on these visits that he joined al-Qaida, and he wanted to take revenge for the deaths of Palestinian children and for French military intervention overseas.


"Merah explained he was against the headscarf ban and was fighting against the French participation [in] Nato operations in Afghanistan," said Ebba Kalondo, editor-in-chief of France 24. Merah was calm, talked articulately and said all the murders had been filmed and the videos would be posted online, Kalondo said.


Another man, who said he was 24 and a warehouse worker but did not give his name, said he knew the family, in particular the suspect's brother. He said: "I came down here because I wanted to see what was going on. I heard someone at work listening to the news this morning say: 'It's an Arab, It's an Arab' … He was the kind of kid who got into trouble, but he was a banal young guy. Over the past two years he had changed a lot. He wasn't into having fun, he became harder. He didn't really go to the mosque, he seemed more likely to meet people in obscure flats."

Suspect in French Jewish school shooting visited Israel

Quote: TOULOUSE - Hours after the death of Mohamed Merah, the man suspected of the shootings in Toulouse and Montauban, new details emerged which seemed to contradict previous reports regarding his identity.


According to a report published in Le Monde on Thursday, Merah was not a member of any well-known Islamic terrorist organization, but did undergo a process of radicalization. Merah also reportedly had entry stamps to Israel and other countries in the region in his passport.

Merah was also added to a "no fly" list maintained by U.S. authorities some time ago, two American officials told Reuters. The officials would not disclose precisely when Merah was placed on the list.


Meanwhile, a little-known extremist group on Thursday claimed responsibility for a series of deadly shootings in France, saying they were in response to what it called "Israel's crimes" against the Palestinians.


"The jihadists everywhere are keen to avenge every drop of blood unfairly shed in Palestine, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Muslim countries," said the self-styled group, Soldiers of Caliphate, in a statement posted on a militant website called Supporters of the Mujhadeen.


"We call on the French government to reconsider its policy against the Muslims ... because this policy will only lead to severe punishment and destruction," the statement said. The group called the suspect in the shootings Joseph the French.


Earlier on Thursday, A 32-hour siege by French police outside the home of the suspected perpetrator of the Toulouse school shootings earlier this week ended when police raided the apartment, prompting the 24-year-old suspect to jump out a window and fall to his death.


In a statement made after the siege ended, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that Muslim citizens of France are not reponsible for the "crazy" actions of the perpetrator of the Toulouse shootings, and that all people who consult hate or terrorism websites will be punished by the authorities.


In a drama gripping France five weeks before a presidential election, some 300 police have laid siege since Wednesday to the five-storey house in a suburb of the prosperous industrial town in a bid to capture the shooter. suspected of killing seven people in the name of al-Qaida.


The French citizen of Algerian origin told negotiators he had killed three soldiers last week and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and because of French army involvement in Afghanistan.


France's elite RAID commando unit detonated three explosions just before midnight on Wednesday, flattening the main door of the building and blowing a hole in the wall, after it became clear Merah did not mean to keep a promise to turn himself in.


Another explosion and several gunshots were heard in the early hours of Thursday morning.


The huge operation, involving hundreds of investigators and police started only on Monday afternoon, in the aftermath of the shooting at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, despite the fact that already four days earlier, after the murder of two French soldiers, it was clear that the perpetrator was repeating himself, and that he was liable to attack again.


For a period of days, security forces continued on the Neo-Nazi route, and dismissed other possible lines of inquiry, even though it seems as if Mohamed Merah was under the radar of the security forces, and that he was known to them as a radical Islamist operative.


Those slain at the Jewish school, all of French-Israeli nationality, were buried in Israel on Wednesday as relatives sobbed inconsolably. The bodies of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 3, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsenego had been flown there earlier in the day.

He went on to declare "reassembly and unity" a top national priority.

French Interior Minister Claude Gueant confirmed the death at approximatley 12:00 P.M. local time, after a number of reports surfaced in the French media that the suspect, Mohamed Merah, had died.