The unidentified gunman who shot dead a rabbi and three children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, southwestern France, may have filmed the massacre, the country’s interior minister said Tuesday.
Claude Gueant confirmed reports that witnesses saw the killer, who is linked to two earlier military shootings in Toulouse and nearby Montauban, wearing a video camera during the shooting at the Ozar Hatorah school.
The camera “records wide-angle footage that can then be watched on a computer,” and appears to have been worn on the gunman’s chest and adjusted by straps, Gueant told Europe 1 radio station
“I don’t know if he was filming everything but this camera was seen,” he said.
Police have been scouring the internet to see if the killer had posted the footage anywhere, but as of Tuesday no trace was found, Gueant added.
“We have reached the summit of barbarism,” Gueant said, adding that the killer appeared to be a person who was “very cold, very determined, very in control of himself, very cruel.”
“Our priority now is to find the killer,” he added, noting concern that the killer could attack again.
His comments came before schools across the country held a minute’s silence at 11:00am local time to remember the victims of the attack — Jonathan Sandler, 30; his two sons Aryeh, three, and Gavriel Yissacher, six; and the daughter of the school’s principal, Miriam Monsonego, 10.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who put his presidential campaign on hold following the slaying, paid his respects to the victims at a school in Paris, near a Holocaust memorial.
The bodies of Sandler, a French citizen, and the three children, all Israeli-French citizens, will be flown to Israel, via Paris, where they would be buried Wednesday, as requested by their families, a spokeswoman for the French Jewish Consistory confirmed to the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, the hunt intensified for the gunman as several regions declared a scarlet alert, one of the highest possible terror alerts, which gives authorities he power to disrupt daily life and implement sweeping security measures, such as closing airports.
Gueant said earlier that five units of mobile forces had been deployed to southwestern France and checks and searches were being stepped up at airports, train stations, public places and roads.
Authorities are investigating three former soldiers, who were allegedly members of a neo-Nazi cell at a barracks in Montauban in 2008.
“Indeed inquiries have taken place regarding soldiers who were kicked out of the army and who might want to seek revenge… who might have expressed neo-Nazi opinions,” Gueant said.
The school shooting followed the killing of three French paratroopers — all of North African descent — last week in two separate incidents. The gunman used the same weapon and stolen scooter in all three attacks, officials said.
Two uniformed French soldiers were killed at point-blank range and a third seriously wounded as they withdrew money from an ATM in the center of nearby Montauban on March 15. Four days before that attack, another soldier was shot dead by a man on a scooter in Toulouse.
{NY Post/Matzav.com Newscenter}
