In France, too, it seems

Scott Sayare has an article in The New York Times about a school shooting:

Hundreds of police officers surrounded a small apartment building in Toulouse, France (photo), and were negotiating with a 24-year-old man suspected in the methodical killing of seven people, including three young children, in the past ten days, French officials said. The Associated Press reported that Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said the suspect has promised to turn himself into police and that, if he did not, the police would storm the apartment and attempt to arrest him by force.
The man told police negotiators that the killings of the children and a rabbi at a Jewish school, as well as the fatal shootings of three French paratroopers days earlier, were to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French military deployments abroad, according to investigators and Interior Minister Claude Guéant, who was at the site of the raid on Wednesday morning.
The suspect, identified as a French national from Toulouse, who said he belonged to al-Qaeda, fired several volleys at security forces ringing the five-floor apartment building in which he had barricaded himself, about two miles south of the Jewish school. Three officers were slightly wounded, Guéant said. Speaking on French television, the interior minister said authorities were “certain” that the suspect was the gunman responsible for all seven deaths and that it was possible that he would surrender later Wednesday. He added that, although the suspect had thrown a handgun out a window, he was still armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and other military weapons. The suspect had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Guéant said, and described himself as a mujahideen, or freedom fighter. The man had been under surveillance by the French domestic intelligence service “for a long while” before the shootings of the paratroopers, “though nothing whatsoever allowed us to think he was at the point of committing a criminal act,” the interior minister said.
A senior Pakistani official said that intelligence services there had no information on whether the suspect had visited Pakistan.
Only after the attack on the Jewish school on Monday did investigators come to view him as the principal suspect, Guéant said.
Aviv Zonabend, the vice president of the local branch of the Crif, France’s most prominent Jewish organization, who met with Guéant on Wednesday morning, gave a slightly different account, saying that investigators apparently had been unable to locate the suspect before the shootings on Monday.
The killings of the paratroopers, who were shot in two separate incidents in Toulouse and the nearby city of Montauban, apparently were not linked to their ethnic backgrounds, Guéant said; two of the victims were of Arab origin and one was black.
Police officials negotiating with the suspect brought his mother to the residence in the hope she would help persuade him to surrender, but she declined to speak to the suspect, Guéant said, adding that her son had refused to listen to her in the past. The suspect’s brother, who was known locally for his radical religious ideology, was detained for questioning outside Toulouse, Guéant said, without giving details.
Investigators said the suspect’s first name was Mohammed, according to Zonabend, and French media have identified him as Mohammed Merah, but officials have not confirmed that.
A representative of the police union, Didier Martinez, said about three hundred officers had been deployed in the operation. Several hours after the siege began, French media reports said police negotiators were talking to the suspect through a door.
The police action, which started at about 3 a.m. and was continuing nine hours later, came after lengthy planning, officials said. Earlier, authorities had offered new details on the killings at the Jewish school, an assault that has stunned the nation and terrorized Toulouse. They said the gunman seemed to be filming his actions as he coolly shot his victims. Guéant said surveillance footage from the school’s security cameras showed what appeared to be a video camera strapped to his chest.
The attack was quickly linked to the two earlier shootings of French paratroopers, with the police saying that the same gun, a .45-caliber automatic pistol, was used in all three assaults. The authorities have also said that the methods were the same: a man on a powerful motorbike, also the same in each instance, who killed and then fled.
President Nicolas Sarkozy called the shooting a “national tragedy” and ordered a minute’s silence at schools across France on Tuesday. Sarkozy will preside over a funeral service in Montauban on Wednesday for the three soldiers killed in the earlier attacks. The French leader had ordered the region’s security alert to “scarlet”, its highest level, for the manhunt. That is one step short of a formal state of emergency, giving security forces wide powers that include the authority to close some public places, halt and search public transportation networks, and to deploy combined patrols of police officers and soldiers. Police were ordered to guard Muslim and Jewish schools and places of worship across the region.
Before the authorities said that their prime suspect claimed ties to al-Qaeda, many analysts had speculated on whether he was motivated by extreme right-wing passions coinciding with the presidential elections.
After the shootings, the candidates suspended their campaigns, as political debate swirled around whether the killings were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant issues in a long and heated campaign when President Sarkozy is trying to win back voters who drifted to the far-right National Front party.
But the suspect’s apparent links to al-Qaeda seemed likely to shift that debate onto familiar themes, also associated with Sarkozy, of law and order and the fight against terrorism, particularly if the authorities are able to end the crisis with arrest of the suspect, removing the immediate threat of further bloodletting. It remained unclear how the killings may affect the election, which is only weeks away. Nor was it clear if they will stoke anti-Muslim rhetoric among some politicians and voters— Muslims complain widely of feeling vilified by some elements, on the right in particular, and the anti-immigration far right has been gaining unprecedented popularity in recent months. It is also possible the deaths could cause a calming of the political discourse.
President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Jewish and Muslim leaders in Paris on Wednesday morning, and called for restraint and solidarity among the populace. “We must be united,” he said in a brief address. “We must yield neither to easy falsehoods nor to vengeance.”
Richard Prasquier, the national head of Crif, the Jewish organization, said before meeting with Sarkozy,: “It is absolutely excluded that we confuse this character— and the Islamist, jihadist, al-Qaeda-linked movement he represents— and the Islam of France, which is a religion like all other religions.”
“These acts are in total contradiction with the foundations of this religion,” said Mohammed Moussaoui, the president of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, who also met with Sarkozy.

Rico says a cheap pun about the perpetrator having 'nothing Toulouse' comes to mind, but we'll ignore that... (Of course, the thought of Mohammed saying "Aww, mom..." when the cops brought her to see him also comes to mind...)