France terror attack: Self-declared al Qaeda militant claims to have been trained in Waziristan

France terror attack: Self-declared al Qaeda militant claims to have been trained in Waziristan

French police laid siege Wednesday to an apartment block where a self-declared al Qaeda militant who boasted of having “brought France to its knees” with a wave of deadly attacks was holed up.

Prosecutors said suspect Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had fought off several police assaults on his flat and bragged to negotiators of having been trained by al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

“He expressed no regret apart from not having had enough time to kill more victims and even boasted of having brought France to its knees,” France’s top anti-terror prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters.

Molins said Merah had claimed responsibility for three cold-blooded shootings over the previous 10 days in which three French paratroopers, three Jewish children and a teacher were killed, shocking the nation.

He claimed to be avenging Palestinian deaths and opposing the French military’s involvement in Afghanistan and France’s ban on full-face veils.

Molins said the suspect had shot and wounded two elite officers after police first raided the apartment building in the southwestern city of Toulouse before dawn.

“Mohamed Merah explained that he belonged to al Qaeda. He explained he had been trained by al Qaeda in the Pakistani-Afghanistan region in Waziristan,” Molins told reporters in Toulouse, scene of two of the shootings.

Waziristan is a tribal area straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border which is known as a haven for militants — including al Qaeda militants — connected to Taliban guerrillas fighting in both countries.

Molins said the suspect had gone to the region twice and on one occasion had been arrested by Afghan police and handed over to US army troops, who put him on a flight back to France.

“He said he does not have a suicidal spirit, he did not have a martyr’s soul, he preferred to kill and remain alive,” said Molins, adding that the killer had claimed to have always acted alone.

But Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the gunman had said that he received orders from Al-Qaeda for the attack.

“He explained how he received instructions from al Qaeda during his stay in Pakistan, how he had even been suggested to carry out a suicide mission and refused, but accepted to carry out a general mission to commit an attack in France,” Gueant told TF1 television.

Police and prosecutors said they had arrested Merah’s mother, brother and his brother’s girlfriend as part of the inquiry. Sources said the suspect had been known to the domestic security service for some years.

After the failed police assault on the first floor flat in Toulouse where Merah was living, the two sides settled down to an armed siege. After nine hours other residents were evacuated from the building.

Merah said he would surrender in the course of the evening but an AFP journalist reported that street lighting was switched off in the besieged neighbourhood at around 9:00 pm (2000 GMT), in a move that could be in anticipation of an assault.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for re-election in an April-May vote, told religious representatives at a meeting in a police station near the siege site that the gunman had planned to carry out another attack Wednesday.

Molins told reporters that Merah had chosen two Toulouse policemen to target for future assassination and planned to kill another soldier.

Gueant said the suspect was thought to be armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a Mini-Uzi 9mm machine pistol and other handguns, but had thrown out a .45 pistol used in the seven murders.

He also defended French law enforcement from criticism that because of his alleged links to extremists the shooter should have been intercepted earlier.

“In France you do not get sent to prison for professing strange or extremist ideas,” Gueant told AFP.

He said Merah and other known extremists in the region “had never shown any behaviour that led us to believe they would engage in criminal acts.”

The siege came as the Jewish victims of the attacks were being buried in Jerusalem and two of the soldiers were being laid to rest, one in France and one in Morocco.

The shootings began on March 11, when a paratrooper of North African origin arranged to meet a man in Toulouse to sell him a scooter.

A message sent from the suspect’s brother’s IP address was used to set up an appointment to inspect the bike, an appointment at which paratrooper Imad Ibn Ziaten was subsequently killed, police said.

Four days later three more paratroopers from another regiment were gunned down, two of them fatally, in the same fashion in a street in the nearby garrison town of Montauban.

The pair — Corporal Abel Chennouf, 25, and Private First Class Mohammed Legouade, 23, — were also French soldiers of North African Arab origin.

Then on Monday the shooter, again wearing a motorcycle helmet and riding a scooter, attacked the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a religious studies teacher, his toddler sons and a seven-year-old girl.

Sarkozy and several rival candidates for the presidency attended a memorial ceremony for the slain soldiers at their barracks in Montauban.

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Posted by Ammar Ahmad on Mar 22 2012. Filed under Latest News, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry