France: Siege gunman shot in head by police
The gunman who claimed responsibility for a radical Islam-inspired killing spree was shot in the head by police, officials say.
And Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin, filmed all three of his attacks that killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said that “everything was done to try to arrest him alive”.
Police entered his apartment following a 32-hour stand-off. Molins said the gunman came out of the bathroom shooting wildly and aggressively and was shot in the head as he jumped out of the window.
Molins said Merah burst out of his bathroom, firing his handgun about 30 times.
Merah continued to fire “until he was hit by a retaliatory shot from the RAID (elite police unit), which felled him with a bullet to the head”, Molins said.
Merah had filmed all three killings, and claimed to have posted them online. Police have viewed the videos.
The prosecutor said the gunman, in his first killing of a paratrooper on March 11, is heard on the video saying: “You kill my brothers; I kill you.”
When killing two other paratroopers four days later in the nearby town of Montauban, he cried out “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great” in Arabic.
