French Police: Gun Used in Jewish School Attack Tied to Murder of Muslim Soldiers
French police reopened the area where four people were killed shortly after 8:00 A.M. outside a Jewish school on Monday, and are investigating whether the gun used for the murder of a rabbi and three children was also used to murder two Muslim French paratroopers last week.
“All the shooting took less than a minute,” said Baruch Sabag, a teacher at the Jewish school who ran inside the building along with some 100 children and teachers who were standing in the courtyard when the shooting took place. “We hid in the building as soon as we heard the shots and only after ten minutes, when the police arrived, were we told we could go outside.”
“We didn’t know what was going on,” said David Gadage, a parent of one of the school’s students. “We had only just heard gunshots and within seconds the terrorist had disappeared. We are all in a state of shock right now. This is a quiet area and there have never been problems of anti-Semitism here before. We actually moved here because of the area’s peacefulness and because, unlike in other places, there are no problems here with the Muslim immigrants.”
Initial ballistic investigations suggest that the gun used in Monday morning’s attack was the same gun used to murder two French paratroopers last week, and was apparently used in a similar way.
Four days ago, two paratroopers were killed in nearby Montauban, and another paratrooper was killed eight days ago in Toulouse. The dead and injured were all of North African and Caribbean origin.
The fact that some of the soldiers were of North African descent led French police to investigate the possibility that the perpetrators of Monday’s attack were former soldiers who are members of a Neo-Nazi group. Another possibility being investigated is that a radical Islamic group is responsible for the attack, yet as of Monday night no organization has claimed responsibility.
