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发帖数: 901 | 1 A gunman shot dead three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse
on Monday, days after killing three soldiers nearby, prompting French
President Nicolas Sarkozy to put the region on its highest terrorism alert.
With the attacker, who escaped on a motorbike, still on the loose, police
stepped up a manhunt in the city of a million people in southwestern France.
Sarkozy said the killings and those of the soldiers, one of Caribbean and
two of Muslim origin, in two attacks last week, appeared to be motivated by
racism.
Mourners gathered for an overnight vigil at the Ozar Hatorah school in a
leafy residential neighborhood in Toulouse, where the gunman went on the
rampage on Monday morning, killing a 30-year old rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his
children aged four and five, and another child, the daughter of the school'
s principal.
The 7-year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, died in her father's arms as medics
tried to resuscitate her.
"He came on his motorbike, got off and shot a bullet in the air... Then he
got out another gun and started shooting at everyone, at the children. He
chased us into the school," Baroukh, a Jewish man living nearby who had come
for morning prayers, told Reuters, declining to give his family name.
Military police reinforcements were rushed into the area and guards were
deployed at mosques and synagogues in the region. In the United States, New
York police ramped up security at synagogues and other Jewish institutions
citywide.
Video surveillance footage showed the gunman bursting into the school and
shooting one child at close range in the head, before fleeing on a motorbike
, said Nicolas Yardeni, regional head of the French Jewish umbrella
association, CRIF.
It was the worst anti-Semitic incident in France since August 1982, when six
people were killed in a grenade attack and subsequent shooting at the
Goldenberg restaurant in a Jewish neighborhood of central Paris. France's
600,000-strong Jewish community is Europe's largest.
Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, the Socialist opposing him in his uphill bid
for re-election in May, both rushed to the scene.
"Barbarity, savagery and cruelty cannot win, hate cannot win. The republic
is much stronger than all this," Sarkozy said, announcing a minute of
silence in schools on Tuesday.
"One can imagine that the bloodthirsty madness was linked to racism,"
Sarkozy said, declaring he would suspend his campaign until Wednesday, when
he would attend the soldiers' funeral.
Sarkozy said the gun used in the school shooting was the same one used to
kill the three soldiers by a lone gunman who also escaped on a motor bike.
He said the terrorism alert in the region around Toulouse had been raised to
scarlet, its highest level.
Some 120 investigators were working on a manhunt for the killer and had
already identified the license plate of the motor bike used in the attack,
police sources said. The gunman used a second gun when the first jammed, the
Toulouse prosecutor said.
Police cordoned off the school, where well-wishers had begun to lay wreaths
of flowers outside the bullet-marked walls as a line of police stood guard.
Hearses arrived carrying the bodies of the victims for an overnight vigil
attended by sobbing parents and relatives.
Hundreds of mourners in prayer caps gathered at the main mosque in Toulouse,
a bustling university town which is a hub for Europe's aerospace industry
including aviation manufacturer Airbus. In Paris, thousands staged a silent
evening march in central Place de la Republique, while political leaders
joined a solemn remembrance ceremony at the grand synagogue.
"HORROR"
"I saw two people dead in front of the school, an adult and a child ...
Inside, it was a vision of horror, the bodies of two small children," one
father, searching for his son at the school among crowds of distraught
parents and children, told RTL radio.
"How can they attack something as sacred as a school?"
As messages of condolence poured in from across Europe, representatives of
France's Jewish community voiced their solidarity. In the past decade, there
has been a string of attacks on synagogues and Jewish schools, which
educate some 30,500 children in France.
"I am horrified by what happened outside a Jewish school in Toulouse today.
It has bruised by body and my soul," said Gilles Bernheim, France's chief
rabbi.
The Israeli embassy in Paris said the bodies of all four victims would be
flown to Israel for burial as soon as possible at the request of their
families.
"Today we had a savage crime in France that gunned down French Jews, among
them children," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters in
Jerusalem. "I'm sure that Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, and his
government will do their utmost to find the killer and we in Israel will do
everything to help them in this task. "
Public prosecutor Valet said investigators were studying video evidence from
the school shooting and the attack on Thursday in the nearby town of
Montauban that killed two soldiers and left a third seriously injured.
The three men, aged between 24 and 28, were shot while in uniform as they
tried to withdraw money from a cash machine close to the barracks of the
17th parachute regiment. A female witness told French television the masked
attacker appeared to have a tattoo on his face when he lifted his visor.
A third soldier, aged 30, was killed the previous weekend in Toulouse. In
the wake of the attacks, French media reported that two members of the 17th
regiment had been expelled for neo-Nazism in 2008, prompting speculation of
a racist motivation.
The shootings could thrust security back to the top of the agenda in a
bitter electoral campaign that has been dominated by issues of taxation and
immigration. "This is not just one school, Jews, or just one city which have
been affected but all of France," Hollande said in Toulouse.
Stephane Rozes, head of CAP political consultancy, said the shootings were
unlikely to have a decisive impact on the election outcome as all candidates
had strongly condemned the violence, including far right leader Marine Le
Pen.
Le Pen said politics and the election campaign should be kept out at times
like this. "There is no more right or left, there is only the French people,
wounded in its heart." | R********n
发帖数: 5904 | | s*********8
发帖数: 901 | 3 In France, there are 0.5M Jewish and 10 times muslim people | p********7
发帖数: 18007 | | w*********g
发帖数: 30882 | 5 I guess this will happen in U.S. |
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