REPORTING FROM PARIS -- The 31-hour standoff between French authorities and Islamic-extremist Mohammed Merah ended with a series of loud explosions and dramatic gunfight. According police officials, the commotion was the beginning of a raid that left Merah dead.
Claude Guéant the French Interior Minister said the suspect was hiding in the bathroom when the elite police squad raided the apartment. After quietly sitting in the bathtub while the officers searched the apartment, the suspect came out with guns blazing and engaged the armed officers in a shootout that was unlike any they had ever encountered.
Merah then jumped out of a window still shooting while falling to his death. Two police officers were injured in the gunfight but should recover.
Merah, 23, had pledged to hand himself over to police on Wednesday night, but reneged on the promise. Earlier, about 3 a.m. Wednesday, members of an elite police squad surrounded a block of apartments in a residential area of Toulouse in southwestern France. As police tried to smash their way into one unit, shots were fired from inside, injuring three officers.
Police laid siege to the building, evacuating other residents and trying to persuade the alleged gunman to surrender. They identified the suspect as Merah, a French national of Algerian origin suspected of links to a group associated with Al Qaeda.
France has just been through an ordeal,” President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a televised address shortly after the operation. He praised the work of French security forces and said the episode would prompt him to seek changes in the law to criminalize travel abroad by French citizens for training or “indoctrination” by terror groups.
A former garage mechanic of Algerian descent, Mr. Merah made two trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, and said that he had been trained by Al Qaeda. Though Mr. Merah had initially indicated to negotiators that he hoped to live, Mr. Guéant told French radio earlier on Thursday he had indicated he wished “to die with weapons in his hands.”
Mr. Merah had barricaded himself in the apartment building in the quiet neighborhood of Côte Pavée on Wednesday, after police attempted to arrest him shortly after 3 a.m.
A series of explosions and gunshots which began before midnight continued into the early hours of Thursday, when French news media reported that security forces were attempting to destroy a window at the suspect’s apartment, deprive him of sleep and let in the night cold in the hope that Mr. Merah might surrender peacefully.
But those hopes diminished late on Wednesday after Mr. Merah indicated that “if he was taken, he would kill police officers,” Mr. Guéant said.
In the first six hours of the standoff, the suspect fired several heavy volleys at officers trying to enter his apartment, wounding two, though neither seriously. At one point he tossed a .45-caliber pistol from the window, the same kind used in each of the three attacks, and was given some kind of “means of communication,” according to the authorities, presumably a cellphone or walkie-talkie.
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