His only regret was that he didn’t kill more. An Al Qaeda sympathizer who bragged of gunning down French soldiers and schoolkids had planned more attacks. He has been locked in a standoff with police. Click below to read the rest of the story.
Holed up in the cold and dark, Mohammed Merah reneged on several promises to surrender and shot at heavily armed SWAT cops who advanced on the Toulouse apartment.
He boasted to police negotiators about his scooter-riding death spree: the execution of three paratroopers on March 11 and 15 and Monday’s slaughter of a rabbi and three kids at a Jewish school.
“[He\] expresses no regret, only that he didn’t have time to have more victims,†Prosecutor Francois Molins said. “He even bragged…of bringing France to its knees.â€
During the standoff, orange flashies lit up the sky as three explosions went off near the apartment. It was unclear if police or the suspect was responsible for the bombs.
Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent, said the ambushes were payback for the death of Palestinian children, France’s presence in Afghanistan and a ban on burqas.
He claimed that after he was trained in Pakistan, he rejected a suicide bombing mission but agreed to carry out a terrorist attack in France for Al Qaeda, officials said.
During one of his two visits to Afghanistan, Merah was detained by Afghan police at a checkpoint and turned over the U.S. Army, which “put him on the first plane headed to France,†Molins said.
The Pentagon was trying to verify those details.
Merah’s brother was implicated in a 2007 network that sent fighters to Iraq. A petty criminal with a long juvenile rap sheet, Merah was under surveillance because of his extremist views.
Cops zeroed in on him after his brother contacted a motorcycle shop and asked how to modify the GPS on a Yamaha — the make of motorbike used by the killer.
They also tied the suspect to an email he sent to one of the slain soldiers, answering a classified ad about a scooter for sale.
