21-03-2012, 07:43 PM
French Interior Minister: Police in Armed Stand-Off with Toulouse Shooting Suspect
March 21st, 2012Update: "Merah Had Been Tracked for Years by France's DCRI Domestic Intelligence Service"Via: AFP:
Suspected jihadi serial killer Mohamed Merah is a 23-year-old French petty criminal of Algerian origin who spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan and claims to be an Al-Qaeda militant.
Born in the southwestern French city of Toulouse on October 10, 1988, Merah had been tracked for years by France's DCRI domestic intelligence service, but nothing suggested that he was preparing a major crime.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant said he was part of a group of around 15 followers of Islamic fundamentalist Salafist ideology in Toulouse, where he lived in the northern Izards neighbourhood.
He has made two trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, although Gueant said he did not think Merah had visited any militant training camps while there.
End Update
Update: U.S. Sent Suspect Back to France from Afghanistan
Via: AFP:
The U.S. army sent a Frenchman currently besieged by police in Toulouse after the killings of seven people, back to France after he was arrested in Afghanistan, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
Afghan police detained the man at a road checkpoint and handed him over to the U.S. army "who put him on the first plane headed to France," prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters.
End Update
Telegraph: Live Updates
Via: Telegraph:
Police officers have exchanged gunfire and are negotiating with a man who claims connections to al Qaeda and is suspected of killing of four people at a Jewish school and three soldiers in southwest France, the French Interior Minister has told reporters.
Mr Claude Gueant said that the 24-year-old man had made several visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan and said that he was acting out of revenge for France's military involvement overseas.
"He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda," Mr Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.
"He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions," Mr Gueant said.
Heavily armed police in bullet-proof vests and helmets cordoned off the residential area where the raid was taking place, in a suburb a few kilometres from the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school which was the scene of Monday's shootings.
Mr Gueant said that police were also talking to the brother of the gunman, who is a French citizen from Toulouse.
Posted in COINTELPRO, False Flag Operations
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