French FM Alain Juppe meets with Peres ahead of funerals for victims of the Toulouse Jewish school shooting: "The blood of both our nations was spilled in this murder"; president: We represent human justice.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe met with President Shimon Peres Wednesday morning in Jerusalem, and expressed France's solidarity with Israel on the day of the funerals for the four victims of the Toulouse Jewish school shooting, says Jerusalem Post.
Mr Claude Gueant said that the 24-year-old man had made several visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan and said that he was acting out of revenge for France's military involvement overseas.
"He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda," Mr Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.
"He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions," Mr Gueant said.
Heavily armed police in bullet-proof vests and helmets cordoned off the residential area where the raid was taking place, in a suburb a few kilometres from the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school which was the scene of Monday's shootings, informs Telegraph.co.uk.
French officials have been worried that the group may try to conduct an action in France ahead of presidential elections in April and May, a counterterrorism official told The Associated Press this week. So far, it has never succeeded in reaching across the Mediterranean Sea to strike in Europe.
The suspect "is a terrorist ... I think all terrorists are crazy whatever their motivation," said Marc Sztulman, head of the Mediterranean branch of the main Jewish organization, CRIF.
"I see absolutely no connection between killers of children in a school under the pretext they are Jewish and what is happening 6,000 kilometers away," he said after meeting with the interior minister. "Only a crazy man can make the link", accoding to Atlanta Journal Constitution.
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