I’ll go to paradise
France school shooting susp killed in standoff
BEFORE HE was shot dead while leaping off a balcony, French terror suspect Mohamed Merah told police he planned to go out in a blaze of martyrdom glory.
Reneging on a pledge to surrender, he said someone would have to die — either him or the masked SWAT cops ringing his Toulouse hideout.
“If it’s me, who cares? I’ll go to paradise,” he said, according to prosecutor Francois Molins.
Hours later, Merah lay on the pavement in a black robe and flak jacket, his Colt .45 pistol at his side and a bullet in his head.
A 32-hour siege was over, but a key question remained unanswered: How did an Islamist extremist on the U.S. no-fly list and supposedly under surveillance manage to amass an arsenal and carry out three brazen scooter attacks?
His reign of terror ended in dramatic fashion Thursday when cops took his door off the hinges and crept in with robot cameras.
“Merah suddenly burst out of the bathroom where he was hiding, armed and firing at police at an extremely fast rate, so fast that it was like automatic-weapon fire,” Molins said.
“He was attacking, lunging at police across the apartment and firing at them with a Colt .45,” Molins said. “He continued to move forward, armed and firing, jumping from the balcony until he was mortally hit by return fire from the police. They got him in the head.”
Molins confirmed Merah, 23, filmed all three of his drive-by attacks: the March 11 murder of a solider he contacted about buying a motorbike, the March 15 slaying of two paratroopers, and Monday’s school slaughter that left a rabbi and three children dead.
Merah told authorities he planned to post the footage on the Internet, and was plotting to kill another soldier and two cops when he was cornered early Wednesday.
Officials said they wanted to capture him alive and only moved in when it was clear he would not surrender.
Now investigators will turn their attention to Merah’s past and links to terrorist groups. The SITE Intelligence Group reported that the jihadist group Jund al-khilafah claimed responsibility for the death spree by a man they called “Yusuf of France,” but counterterrorism officials said it could be empty bragging.
Merah told police he had trained with Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-pakistan border as recently as last August. And French officials said that during one visit to Afghanistan, he was detained by local cops and turned over to the U.S. Army, which sent him to France.
Authorities have not confirmed that, but a U.S. official said Merah had been on a list of suspected or confirmed terrorists barred from airlines since 2010.
During the standoff, Merah claimed he wanted to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and the French army’s involvement in the Middle East. Yet he also tried to join the French military but was rebuffed, possibly because of a rap sheet full of petty crimes.
The French said Merah and his older brother had been monitored for extremist views, but he still got his hands on an Uzi, Sten pistol, a revolver and a pump-action rifle found in his car.