Residential Neighbourhood: France

Northern Toulouse Dept: The call, reported to police who had already zeroed in on Mr. Merah as their prime suspect, set off an extraordinary and eerie scene in a residential neighbourhood in northern Toulouse, whose elegant pink-stone buildings in the more elite quarters make it known as the Rose City. Police laid siege to Mr. Merah s apartment in the predawn hours on Wednesday and settled into a standoff that lasted through the day and into the night, according to Globe and Mail. Amid a wrenching day of horrific revelations, tense negotiations and moving funeral scenes, the increasingly angry French politics of citizenship and religion reared their head. The fact that Mr. Merah was an apparent radical Islamist and the child of Algerian immigrants was seized upon by far-right politicians almost as soon as the raids were under way, and provoked a sharp debate that is likely to dominate campaigning for the first round of France s presidential election on April 22 and mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, reportedly confessed in a phone call to a TV network, and then during negotiations with the police surrounding his Toulouse apartment. He told a reporter for France 24 that he committed three scooter-borne shootings in which he killed three paratroopers, two of them Muslim, a rabbi, his two young sons and an eight-year-old Jewish girl and planned more killings in what he described as a political act of vengeance against France s domestic and international policies. Determined to take him alive, more than 200 police surrounded the house, engaged him through his front door and, shortly after midnight Thursday, blasted the doors and windows off the house to intimidate him. Throughout the day and deep into the night, the area around the building remained cordoned off from onlookers, a murky no-go area filled with police vans and populated by hundreds of heavily armed police and special agents wearing black balaklavas over their faces. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.