Shooting suspect Mohamed Merah arrest denied by French officials

 

French police continue to lay siege to an apartment block where a self-declared al-Qaeda militant suspected of committing a series of deadly attacks on troops and Jewish children is holed up. Local media had earlier reported the hours long siege in southwestern France had ended in the arrest of the suspect, identified as Mohamed Merah. Those reports have now been denied by French Interior Minister Claude Gueant. Gunfire erupted as members of the RAID police special forces team tried to storm Merah’s apartment in a residential district of Toulouse in a pre-dawn raid, and two officers were wounded, Gueant said. Officials said that Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent who has visited Afghanistan and Pakistan, bragged of being an al-Qaeda member and said he had killed to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children. About 300 police, some in bullet-proof body armor, have cordoned off an area surrounding the four-storey house where the Merah has been holed up on the ground floor. A police source had said earlier that authorities would not allow the siege to drag on indefinitely. Another source claimed Merah also planned to kill another soldier. He said the suspect “told investigators this morning that he had decided to kill a soldier in Toulouse on Wednesday morning and had already identified the victim.” Merah had been arrested for bomb making in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar in 2007 but escaped months later in a Taliban prison break, the director of prisons in Kandahar said. Kandahar prison chief Ghulam Faruq said that security forces detained Merah on Dec. 19, 2007, and he was sentenced to three years in jail for planting bombs in Kandahar province, the Taliban’s birthplace. Merah escaped jail along with up to 1,000 prisoners, including 400 Taliban insurgents, during a Taliban attack on southern Afghanistan’s main prison in June 2008.