Mar 20, 2012 4 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
This is what the AP first reported:
(AP) French hunt school killer, suspect neo-Nazi ties
Police searched southern France on Tuesday for an expert gunman suspected of fatally shooting seven people in the head at close range in attacks that may have been motivated by neo-Nazi ties or grudges against minorities.
The shooter is suspected of carrying out three deadly attacks: leaving four people dead on Monday at a Jewish school in Toulouse, three of them young children; killing two French paratroopers and seriously wounding another last Thursday in nearby Montauban; and fatally shooting another paratrooper in Toulouse on March 11.
“We are confronted with an individual extremely determined in his actions, an armed individual who acts always with the same modus operandi,” he said, “in cold blood … with premeditated actions.”
He added the crimes appear to be premeditated due to the killer’s “choices of victims and the choices of his targets” _ the army, the foreign origin of the victims or their religion.
The killer could “act again,” he said.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant described the suspect as “someone very cold, very determined, very much a master of his movements, and by consequence, very cruel.”
However, his suggestion that the attacker was wearing a camera around his neck that could be used to film and post video online was described by the prosecutor as “a hypothesis.”
Norway’s Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in a rampage last year, had suggested in an online manifesto before the killings that a camera could be used to film such “operations.” There was no mention in his indictment that he used one.
Then, in breaking news last night, March 20, this is what happened:
(Reuters) – A man engaged in a shoot-out with French police on Wednesday, suspected of killing four people at a Jewish school this week, claims to be linked to al Qaeda, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
“He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda,” Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.
He also said the man had been in Afghanistan. “He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions,” Gueant said.
He said that police were also talking to the brother of the man who, Gueant said, was 24 years old. Police sources told Reuters that a man had been arrested earlier on Wednesday at a separate location in connection with the killings.
