FOXNews.com: Explosions Heard in Terror Standoff

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Explosions Heard in Terror Standoff Mar 22nd 2012, 07:51 TOULOUSE, France –  A standoff at a Toulouse apartment building entered a second day Thursday with hundreds of French police working to try to capture alive the main suspect in an Al Qaeda-linked killing spree that left seven people dead. Police were using their advantages -- numbers, firepower and psychological pressure -- in hopes of wearing down 24-year-old suspect Mohamed Merah, who is holed up in an apartment in the southwestern French city. Authorities say Merah has boasted about carrying out the shootings of three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi, and three French paratroopers in three separate incidents over the last two weeks. They are believed to be the first incidents of killings inspired by Islamic radical motives in France in more than a decade. Elite police squads set off sporadic blasts throughout the night and into the morning -- some that blew off the apartment's shutters -- in what officials described as a tactic aimed to pressure Merah to give up. 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. He appeared to toy with police negotiators -- first saying he would surrender in the afternoon, then under the cover of darkness, then reneging on those pledges altogether, officials said. Authorities said the shooter, a French citizen of Algerian descent, had been to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he claimed to have received training from Al Qaeda. They said he told negotiators he killed a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school on Monday and three French paratroopers last week 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. "He has no regrets, except not having more time to kill more people and he boasts that he has brought France to its knees," said prosecutor Francois Molins told a news conference Wednesday. French authorities -- like others across Europe -- have long been concerned about "lone-wolf" attacks by young, Internet-savvy militants who find radical beliefs online since they are harder to find and track. Merah espoused a radical brand of Islam and had been to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region twice and to the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan for training, Molins said. He said the suspect had plans to kill another soldier -- prompting the police raid at around 3 a.m. Wednesday. After it erupted into a firefight, wounding two police, a standoff ensued with on-and-off negotiations with the suspect that lasted through the night. As darkness fell, police cut electricity and gas to the building, then quietly closed in to wait out the suspect. Authorities were "counting on his great fatigue and weakening," said Didier Martinez of the SGP police union, adding the siege could go on for hours. Street lights were also cut, making Merah more visible to officers with night vision goggles in case of an assault. The gunman's brother and mother were detained early Wednesday. Molins said the 29-year-old brother, Abdelkader, had been implicated in a 2007 network that sent militant fighters to Iraq, but was never charged. The siege was part of France's biggest manhunt since a wave of terrorist attacks in the 1990s by Algerian extremists. The chase began after France's worst-ever school shooting Monday and two previous attacks on paratroopers beginning March 11 -- killings that have horrified the country and frozen campaigning for the French presidential election next month. The suspect repeatedly promised to turn himself in, then halted negotiations. Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said police were prepared to storm the building if he did not surrender. After bouts of deadly terrorist attacks in France in the 1980s and 1990s, France beefed up its legal arsenal, now seen as one of the most effective in Western Europe and a reference for countries including the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. "The main concern is to arrest him, and to arrest him in conditions by which we can present him to judicial officials," said Interior Minister Claude Gueant Wednesday, saying authorities want to "take him alive." The shooter has proved to be a meticulous operator. At the site of the second paratrooper killing, police found the clip for the gun used in all three attacks -- but no fingerprints or DNA on it. Those slain at the Jewish school, all of French-Israeli nationality, were buried in Israel on Wednesday as relatives sobbed inconsolably. The bodies of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 3, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsenego had been flown there earlier in the day.

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