Officials: No Word From Suspect in French Killings
French authorities have had no contact overnight with Mohammed Merah, who is suspected in seven recent killings and is holed up in an apartment in the southern French city of Toulouse.
“There were two gunshots in the night at 2 a.m. and we don’t know what they correspond to,” Pierre-Henry Brandet, the Fench Interior Ministry spokesman said Thursday. “Since then we have not heard anything from him, our attempts to contact him have not yielded any results. He had said earlier in the night that he wanted to die with weapons in his hands.”
Interior Minister Claude Gueant expressed his concern in an interview with RTL Radio.
“We hope that he is still alive,” he said. “We have a priority to hand him over to the authorities.”
Merah, 23, is wanted in the killings of three French paratroopers and of three students and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, in a string of shootings that began on March 11. He opened fire on police as they tried to break down his apartment door about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, wounding two officers, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Wednesday evening, police switched off the street lights in the district around the apartment, leading to speculation that a new raid was imminent as talks stalled.
Three loud explosions and flashes of light erupted shortly before midnight — but Brandet told CNN the blasts were meant to pressure Merah back into talks with negotiators, and police had not moved in on the apartment.
Around 12:30 a.m. Thursday (7:30 p.m. Wednesday ET), a police convoy left the scene with what appeared to be someone huddled beneath a blanket in the back seat of one of the cars. But there was no sign the siege was breaking up, and two more explosions rang out about an hour later.
Merah told French police that he trained with al Qaeda in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, bordering Afghanistan, and that he planned to attack more soldiers and police Wednesday, Molins said. He said he was acting alone, the prosecutor added.
Ebba Kalondo, the senior news editor of the television network France 24, told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that the suspect had called her about two hours before police arrived at his residence and laid out details of the killings that only police would have known — “very, very specific information” such as the number of shots fired and the shell casings left behind.
“He seemed to be very aware that a massive manhunt was under way for him,” Kalondo said. “He said he wasn’t scared, and that neither capture nor death scared him at all.”
Hours into the siege, French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke at a memorial service for the three paratroopers, calling their killing “a terrorist execution.”
One of the victims was due to become a father soon, but “a killer without scruples decided that he would never meet the child to be born,” Sarkozy said.