Toulouse suspect still holed up, surrounded by 300 police

TOULOUSE, France — Hundreds of police officers surrounded a small apartment building in Toulouse early on Wednesday and were negotiating with a 24-year-old man suspected in the methodical killings of seven unarmed people in the past ten days, including three young children.


The man claimed to belong to Al Qaeda, telling negotiators the attacks were meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French military deployments abroad, according to Interior Minister Claude Guéant, who was at the site of the raid on Wednesday morning.


Investigators believe the man, identified as Mohammed Merah, a French national from Toulouse, to be behind the shooting deaths of three French paratroopers as well as an attack on Monday outside a nearby Jewish school that killed a rabbi and three children. Mr. Merah fired several heavy volleys at security forces ringing the five-floor apartment building in which he had barricaded himself, about two miles south of the school. Two officers were slightly wounded, Mr. Guéant said.


As the standoff stretched past 11 hours, The Associated Press reported that Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said the suspect has promised to turn himself into police and that if he did not, the police would attempt to arrest him by force.


Mr. Merah had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan and called himself a mujahedeen, or freedom fighter, Mr. Guéant said, and had been under surveillance by the French domestic intelligence service for several years, “though nothing whatsoever allowed us to think he was at the point of committing a criminal act.” A senior Pakistani official said that intelligence services there had no information on whether the suspect had visited Pakistan.


Only after the attack on the Jewish school on Monday did investigators come to suspect Mr. Merah, though those killings did not provide evidence that led authorities to him, according to Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for Mr. Guéant. Rather, on Monday afternoon, investigators traced an IP address used in connection with the first killing, ten days ago, to Mr. Merah’s mother, and began to suspect his involvement.