TOULOUSE, France, March 22 - French police fired shots and
set off explosives roughly every hour outside an apartment block in
southern France on Thursday to try to force out a 24-year-old gunman
suspected of killing seven people in the name of al Qaeda. Some
27 hours after 300 police first surrounded the five-storey building in a
suburb of the prosperous industrial city of Toulouse, Mohamed Merah, a
French citizen of Algerian origin, was refusing to give himself up.
Instead Merah boasted to police negotiators that he had brought France
to its knees and said his only regret was not having been able to carry
out plans for more killings. He has told negotiators that he
killed three soldiers last week and a rabbi and three children at a
Jewish school on Monday to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and
because of French army involvement in Afghanistan. He filmed the school
shootings using a camera strapped to him. President Nicolas
Sarkozy, whose handling of the crisis may influence voters less than
five weeks from an election in which he is running for a second term,
promised on Wednesday that justice would be done and asked people not to
take vengeance. France's elite RAID commando unit detonated
three explosions just before midnight on Wednesday, flattening the main
door of the building and blowing a hole in the wall, after it became
clear Merah did not mean to keep a promise to turn himself in.
They continued to fire shots roughly every hour, and stepped up the pace
at dawn with two loud explosions that sounded like grenades. Analysts
said police were attempting to exhaust the gunman and make him easier to
capture unharmed. "These were moves to intimidate the gunman
who seems to have changed his mind and does not want to surrender," said
interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet. A dozen bystanders mingled with reporters kept by police at a distance of around 600 metres from the building.


Merah, who authorities say has a weapons cache in the apartment
including an Uzi and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, wounded two officers
on Wednesday. "What we want is to capture him alive, so that
we can bring him to justice, know his motivations and hopefully find out
who were his accomplices, if there were any," Defence Minister Gerard
Longuet told TF1 television.