Police cut off power supply to flat where shootings suspect is holed up apparently with a cache of automatic weapons
On a leafy, residential street of villas with palm trees in the front gardens, hundreds of police and elite, balaclava-clad hit squad officers surrounded an apartment block in Toulouse where a 23-year-old unemployed panel-beater, deemed France's public enemy No 1, was holed up on Wednesday, apparently armed with a cache of automatic weapons.
For more than 14 hours, police surrounded the block in a standoff as Mohamed Merah shouted his claims of an allegiance to al-Qaida through his front door. The state prosecutor, François Molins, said Merah willingly claimed responsibility for three gun attacks that have horrified France: first the shooting dead of three French soldiers in two ambushes last week, then walking up to the gates of a Jewish school on Monday and killing three children and a rabbi, in one case pulling an eight-year-old girl to him by her hair before killing her.
The prosecutor said Merah had claimed his only regret was "not having more time to kill more people" since the start of the shooting spree on 11 March. He boasted he had "brought France to its knees". He had planned another attack on a specific soldier the very morning that police swooped on his flat, and had planned further attacks on local police, officials said.
After one of the biggest manhunts in modern French history, an elite anti-terrorist unit surrounded the 1960s four-storey block of flats at 3.10am on Wednesday. Several neighbours described hearing gunfire and one said he heard the man shout "I can see you" before opening fire.
The elite squad tried to enter the ground floor flat several times but each time were met with gunfire. Three officers were wounded.
Merah at first seemed keen to chat, or as neighbours described it, shout at the officers assembled outside his door. He "talks a lot" the interior minister briefed before sunrise, saying Merah claimed to be a mujahid with al-Qaida links who wanted to "avenge" the deaths of Palestinian children, "attack the French army for its interventions abroad" and take a stand on Sarkozy's ban of the niqab full-face Muslim veil in France.
He was said to have made several visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan and had trained in Waziristan. But the prosecutor also stressed that all Merah's claims must be carefully checked.
As the siege dragged on, residents in the block, who had been hiding under their beds or in their kitchens, were evacuated via the roof. Merah agreed to drop a Colt 45 handgun out of the window in exchange for a mobile phone from police, but at lunchtime he stopped talking and refused to communicate. Police later cut off gas and electricity to his ground floor flat.
Officials said Merah did not have the profile of someone who would kill himself. "He prefers killing and staying alive," the state prosecutor said. They were still hunting a Renault believed to be full of arms.
Meanwhile, a picture was emerging of the young Toulouse man suspected of carrying out the carnage. One of five children raised by his mother, whose family had Algerian roots, in a mixed area of Toulouse, he had a history of petty crime, and had been through France's children's courts many times, serving time in jail.
His mother, thought to live in a one-room apartment across the city, was approached by police before the raid and asked if she could negotiate with him. She refused, saying she had no influence over him. Locals who knew the family said she had not spoken to him and another son for two years. An older brother of Merah was also arrested in connection to the attacks and in custody.
Neighbours said Merah was quiet and helpful and had helped some with moving furniture into flats.
A lawyer who had represented Merah as a child for crimes such as stealing a handbag said he was deeply surprised by the raid as Merah had been a polite teenager "capable of tolerance and dialogue" although he was someone who had done his growing up "on the street" more than through school or family. He had tried to join the army aged 19 but his criminal record had got in the way. He then tried to join the Foreign Legion in his native Toulouse in 2010 and spent one night in a recruitment centre before leaving. He had been under surveillance by police for years.
It was a computer IP address that provided a key clue to Merah's identity. The gunman first struck on 11 March, shooting dead Imad Ibn-Ziaten, an off-duty marshall in the 1st paratroop regiment, who was standing outside a gym in Toulouse.
Ibn-Ziaten had placed an advert online to sell his motorbike, specifying that he was a soldier and giving his first name. Police had scoured all IP addresses which had consulted the online advert, saying it led them to a computer used by Merah's mother. Police then sought out all Yamaha concessions in Toulouse looking for details on a Yamaha TMax scooter used in all three attacks. Ibn-Ziaten was killed by a gunman who kept his motorcycle helmet on and fled on a Yamaha scooter.
Four days later, three other French paratroopers, two of north African origin and one of French Caribbean origin, were shot as they withdrew cash from a bank outside their barracks in the town of Montauban.
The killer arrived and fled by the same motorbike. In the school attack on Monday, the gunman was using a similar bike, but where the first two attacks featured a dark bike, at the school the bike was white. One Yamaha shop in Toulouse said one of the Merah brothers had been in asking how to make changes to a bike and remove the tracker system on it.
Police also reportedly identified Merah from a list of mobile phone calls made in the area around the Jewish school at the time of the attack. The French TV channel France 24 said it had also received a call from a phonebox on Tuesday night, hours before the police raid, in which a man who sounded "calm and young", thought to be Merah, had claimed he carried out the shootings and was affiliated to al-Qaida and warned of more attacks.
Witness reports after the school shooting had suggested the killer might have been wearing a camera around his neck to film the attacks. The state prosecutor said a camera had been found by police and the suspect had said he had "broadcast images on the internet", but investigators had found "no trace" of such videos online "for the moment".
The prosecutor said Merah was a self-taught radical Salafi who had been to Afghanistan twice and had trained in the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan. He had been stopped by police in Afghanistan and cut short his second trip after falling ill with hepatitis A. Molins said the gunman's brother Abdelkader had been implicated in a 2007 network that sent militant fighters to Iraq.
An interior ministry official said Merah has been under surveillance for years for having "fundamentalist" Islamist views.
The interior minister Claude Gueant said no element had pointed to him preparing "criminal action" like this.
As the siege continued, those killed at the gates of the Jewish school, Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, five, and Gabriel, three, and eight-year-old Myriam Monsenego, the daughter of the school principal were buried in Israel. All had joint French-Israeli nationality. At the same time French politicians attended the funerals of the paratroopers who had been killed in Montauban, including one whose partner was pregnant.
Amid a mood of shock in France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who had suspended his election campaign said: "We must not give in to discrimination or revenge."
On the streets near the siege, several young men gathered who claimed they knew the suspect. A 25-year-old French man whose parents were born in Algeria said: "I grew up with him. I'm totally shocked and surprised, I can't believe that he could do this. His mum was French of Algerian origin. She brought him up alone. He didn't have a dad.
"This has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, or with us, and I really hope that all the young people of our type of neighbourhood won't be sullied by this. It has always been hard enough living in France with prejudice but now it's going to be much worse."
Another woman said: "I knew his family and his mother, his father had died. There was nothing to suggest he would have acted like this. The north African community is doubly hit, first by the grief for the victims and what happened, and also that we're from the Maghreb and people will be pointing fingers at us. I appeal to the French, don't mix up the whole community with what has happened. Never, never has Islam said to kill people."