Toulouse Shooting Probe: ‘Weapon, Scooter Used in Previous Attacks’
Source familiar with probe into attack on Jewish school that left four people dead says .45-caliber weapon, stolen scooter were also used in recent attacks on uniformed paratroopers. Netanyahu: Savage crime with murderous anti-Semitic motive. Letter reading ‘You are the people of Satan’ sent to Paris shuls
The same 45-caliber weapon and the same stolen scooter used by an unknown assailant to kill at least four people and injure five others at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France Monday morning appeared to have been used in two previous shooting attacks in Toulouse and Montauban, according to a source who is familiar with the investigation.
According to initial details, a man riding on a scooter opened fire on the school at around 8:10 am, as the students were arriving for the school day, and then fled the scene. A local police official said the shooter fired 15 shots at the school and its students.
News that the gun was used in attacks last week in the Toulouse fueled suspicions that a serial killer on the loose is targeting French minorities, and not only Jews. The dead and injured in the earlier attacks were paratroopers of North African and Caribbean origin. Two of the soldiers were Muslim.
All three times, the attacker came on a motorcycle, apparently alone, and then sped away.
A police official said the same powerful .45-caliber handgun used in Monday’s attack on the school in Toulouse was used in shootings four days ago that killed two paratroopers in nearby Montauban, and in an attack that killed a paratrooper eight days ago in Toulouse.
In Monday’s attack, the killer also used a .35-caliber gun, the police official said.
Surveillance cameras captured the license plate on the unknown assailant’s scooter - a Yamaha T-MAX - which was stolen in Toulouse more than a week before the first attack on French soldiers on March 11.