I am not sure this will come as a surprise to anyone, and France apparently still uses the words Islamic extremist in their news reports unlike our politically correct dialogue in the United States these days.  You can't know who the enemy is if you are not willing to call them what they are.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

TOULOUSE, France (AP) — An Islamic extremist who boasted of killing seven people to strike back at France died Thursday after jumping from his window, gun in hand, in a fierce shootout with police, a French minister said.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the suspect, who claimed links to al Qaeda, jumped out after police entered the apartment Thursday and found him holed up in the bathroom.

The death of Mohamed Merah, 23, ended a more than 32-hour standoff with an elite police squad trying to capture him alive. Merah was wanted in the deaths of seven people, three paratroopers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi, all killed over 10 days. Another student and another paratrooper were wounded in his attacks.

Police said, during hours of negotiations Wednesday when the standoff first began, Merah admitted to being proud of the seven slayings he carried out in three motorcycle shooting attacks around the southwestern city of Toulouse. They are believed to be the first killings inspired by Islamic radical motives in France in more than a decade.

Authorities said Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent, espoused a radical form of Islam and had been to Afghanistan and the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan, where he claimed to have received training from al Qaeda.

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A woman and children are escorted by a police officer near a building where the chief suspect in an al Qaeda-linked killing spree was holed up in an apartment in Toulouse, France, Thursday March 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)

 

Elite police squads set off sporadic blasts throughout the night and into the morning — some blew off the apartment’s shutters — in what officials described as a tactic aimed to pressure Merah to give up. A new set of detonations, known as flash bangs, resounded at 10:30 a.m. (0930 GMT), portending the end to the standoff.

“The killer came out of the bathroom, firing with extreme violence,” Gueant said, adding that the RAID squad had “never seen an assault like it.”

The volley of gunfire resounded throughout the neighborhood Thursday morning, and two police officers were wounded in the firefight.

Gueant said police “went in by the door, taking off the door first. They also came in by the windows.”

He said police used special video equipment to search the second-floor apartment but found him nowhere, until the special instruments surveyed the bathroom.

“The killer came out” firing “with extreme violence,” Gueant told reporters. Police “tried to protect themselves and fired back.”

“Mohamed Merah jumped out the window, gun in hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground,” Gueant said.

Gueant earlier had said police wanted to capture Merah alive.

Holed up alone in an otherwise evacuated apartment building, Merah clung to his few remaining assets, like a small arsenal and authorities’ hopes of taking him alive. On Wednesday, he appeared to toy with police negotiators — first saying he would surrender in the afternoon, then saying he would surrender under the cover of darkness, then reneging on those pledges altogether.

Police said Merah told negotiators he killed a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school on Monday and three French paratroopers before that to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan, as well as a government ban last year on face-covering Islamic veils.

READ MORE HERE:  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/22/police-official-say...