French Islamist killed after 3 attacks, 32-hour standoff
Sarah DiLorenzo and Johanna Decorse
Toulouse shootings gunman Mohamed Merah was killed after a 32-hour stand-off with police Photo: France 2
TOULOUSE, France -- Inspired by radical Islam and trained in Afghanistan, the gunman methodically killed French schoolchildren, a rabbi and paratroopers and faced down hundreds of police for 32 hours. Then he leapt out a window as he rained down gunfire and was fatally shot in the head.
France will not be the same after Mohamed Merah, whose deeds and death Thursday could change how authorities track terrorists, determine whether French Muslims face new stigmas and even influence who becomes the next French president.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking in Paris, announced tough new measures to combat terrorism. He said anyone who regularly visits websites that "support terrorism or call for hate or violence will be punished by the law." He also promised a crackdown on anyone who goes abroad "for the purposes of indoctrination in terrorist ideology."
The top priority for investigators now is determining whether Merah, who claimed allegiance to al Qaeda, was the kind of lone-wolf terrorist that intelligence agencies find particularly hard to trace, or part of a network of homegrown militants.
Either way, French authorities are facing difficult questions after acknowledging that Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had been under surveillance for years and that his travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan were known to French intelligence -- yet he wasn't stopped before he started his killing spree March 11. Merah had been on a U.S. no-fly list since 2010.
Three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers died in France's worst Islamist terrorist violence since a wave of attacks in the 1990s by Algerian extremists.
Merah filmed all three attacks, prosecutor Francois Molins said Thursday, and claimed to have posted them online.