French police in talks with besieged suspect

Shock Gunman killed four people Police in the French city of Toulouse have surrounded a man suspected to be behind Monday’s killing of four people outside a Jewish school and that of three soldiers a few days earlier.Claude Gueant, the French interior minister, said the 24-year-old suspect had agreed to give himself up in the afternoon. “He said...he will turn himself in this afternoon,” Gueant told BFM television, adding that the police were determined to take him alive so that he could stand trial.The AFP news agency quoted a police source as identifying the suspect as Mohammed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin.Gunshots were heard after the police raided the five-storey building at 03:00am (0200 GMT) on Wednesday.Three policemen were reportedly injured in the shootout after the suspect shot through the door.The mother of the suspect had arrived at the scene to negotiate a surrender.Brother arrestedSpeaking to journalists, Gueant said the suspect was a French man and and “he belongs to al-Qaeda.”He said the suspect wanted to “take revenge for Palestinian children” killed in the Middle East, and was angry at the French military for its operations abroad.Gueant added that the man’s brother was arrested and he was known to authorities for having spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland, reporting from Toulouse, said the operation was ongoing.The raid came as funerals for the three children and a rabbi gunned down got under way in Israel.The bodies had earlier arrived in Israel after being flown by Israeli El Al airlines. Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, along with 50 relatives and friends of the victims accompanied the bodies as they were flown home.Jonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old Frenchman, his two sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4 as well as seven-year-old Myriam Monsonego will be buried later on Wednesday morning at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem, accoring to the Israeli embassy in France.President Nicolas Sarkozy paid silent homage to the victims on Tuesday at a school in Paris close to the city’s Holocaust memorial, and afterwards admitted that authorities had as yet no clue as to the identity of the killer.“Anti-Semitism is obvious. The Jewish school attack was an anti-Semitic crime,” Sarkozy told reporters at the Paris school after meeting children.