by Gordon Kerr
Bombs and Booby Traps
The entire school building was booby-trapped and the terrorists sent a message out stating that they would kill 20 hostages for every member of their force who was wounded and 50 for every member killed. If the authorities tried to launch an assault on the school, they would quite simply blow it up. They wanted the president of North Ossetia, Alexander Dzasokhov, to come to the school to negotiate and would not allow the hostages access to food or drink until he did so. The Russian authorities, however, refused to let the president anywhere near the school.
A negotiator who had been involved in the Moscow theatre siege was brought in but by the second day had made little progress. There was resentment, meanwhile, that Moscow was saying nothing and President Vladimir Putin would later be heavily criticized for doing nothing during the crisis.
On the afternoon of the second day, Ruslan Aushev, former president of Ingushetia was allowed into the school and negotiated the release of 26 hostages – 11 nurses and 15 children. He was also given a video tape and a note containing a list of demands from Shamil Basayev, the militant Islamist leader of the Chechen rebels, a man responsible for numerous terrorist outrages. At the time, the Russians declared the video tape to be blank and refused to divulge the contents of the note, but it later emerged that Basayev was demanding ‘formal independence for Chechnya’ within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)’.
Conditions inside the gym hall were desperate. Children were becoming ill due to lack of water and as a result of the heat inside. Many are reported to have become so thirsty that they drank their own urine. They were tired and becoming increasingly weak. This weakness would prove fatal for many who, when the final gun battle broke out the following day, were not strong enough to escape.
On the Brink of Horror
Furthermore, the terrorists were becoming increasingly edgy, mainly because most of them were users of heroin or morphine. It was the quantity of these drugs in their bodies that permitted them to fight on even when horrifically wounded, the drugs helping them to endure unbearable levels of pain. This made it even more worrying that they had set up explosives linked to dead man’s switch detonators. If the foot was removed from the switch, the explosive would be detonated.
On the third day, it was proposed that the president of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov, should come to Beslan to negotiate with the terrorists and he prepared to fly out. It was also announced that 700 prominent Russians had offered to take the places of the schoolchildren. Nevertheless, before either of these initiatives could come to fruition, the crisis was brought to a bloody conclusion.
Agreement was reached that four men would be allowed to drive two ambulances into the school grounds to remove 20 bodies that were lying there. As the ambulances approached there was the sound of an explosion and shots were fired from inside the school. Two of the ambulance men fell dead while the others scrambled for cover.
It seems that the explosion was accidental, a terrorist’s foot simply slipped off the detonator switch. The terrorists were, however, momentarily distracted and the authorities seized the opportunity to launch an attack. It was chaos and many hostages escaping through the holes blown in the walls of the school were gunned down in the crossfire. Armoured personnel carriers and armed helicopters covered the advancing troops while flame-throwers and rocket-propelled grenades were fired from neighbouring buildings and a tank rumbled into the school playground.
After two hours of furious fighting, it was just about over. Sporadic firing by the terrorists continued into the night but by dawn the following day Secondary School No. 1 had fallen silent. 396 people – including 122 children and 31 hostage-takers – had died in what was one of the worst terrorist outrages ever perpetrated.
Toulouse Shootings
Year: 2012
Perpetrator: Mohammed Merah
Murdered: 7
It was just before 8 a.m. on 19 March 2012 and children were being dropped off at the Ozar Hatorah school, a private Jewish school in Toulouse in south-western France. A man rode up to the school on a Yamaha TMAX scooter. Still wearing his crash helmet, the man dismounted and was seen to be carrying what turned out to be a 9mm pistol in his hand. He began firing indiscriminately.
The Worst School Attack in French History
Just outside the gates to the school, Jonathan Sandler, a rabbi who was also a teacher at the school, tried frantically to protect his two young sons, six-year-old Aryeh and three-year-old Gabriel, but was gunned down. As he and one of his sons lay dying, his other son attempted to crawl away from the danger, but he was ruthlessly shot dead by the gunman.
The helmeted man then walked calmly into the school playground as people fled into the building to escape. He fired shots at everyone he saw, teachers, parents and children. An 8 year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, who was the daughter of the school’s head teacher, tried to run away from him, but he went after her, caught her by the hair and pointed his gun at her. For a moment, she was lucky – his gun seemed to jam. But, he pulled out another weapon, a .45-calibre gun, placed the barrel against her temple and squeezed the trigger, killing her instantly.
He turned and walked back to his scooter, jumped on it and sped off, leaving three dead and one boy, 17 year-old Bryan Bijaoui, gravely wounded. It had been the worst school-related attack in French history.
France was horrified and across the country streets in which there were Jewish institutions were closed to traffic. Campaigning in the French Presidential election was suspended and a minute’s silence was observed in all French schools the following day.
It soon became apparent that the shooting was not an isolated incident. The same weapon and the same mode of transport had been used in two other attacks.
Previous Shootings
On 11 March, 30-year-old Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a Master Sergeant in the French 1st Parachute Regiment had been killed by a single shot to the head outside a gym in Toulouse. Ibn-Ziaten was keeping an appointment with a man who had answered an advertisement he had placed selling a motor bike. The man who killed the soldier was later described as wearing a helmet and riding a scooter.
Four days later, on March 15, there had been an incident outside a shopping centre in Montauban, a town about 30 miles north of Toulouse. Two uniformed soldiers, 24-year-old Corporal Abel Chennouf, and 23-year-old Private Mohamed Legouad, were shot dead and a third, 28-year-old Corporal Loïc Liber, was seriously injured. The men – all from the 17th parachute Regiment that was based close to Montauban – had been withdrawing money from a cash machine. The gunman was viewed on CCTV cameras, riding a powerful scooter and wearing a black crash helmet. He rode up and pushed aside an elderly woman before taking aim and gunning down the three men.
A Known Potential Threat
The gunman, Mohammed Merah, had been brought up in a tough part of Toulouse by his mother after his parents divorced when he was five. He had displayed violent tendencies from an early age and suffered from behavioural problems. He was always in trouble and was arrested on numerous occasions, more often than not for purse-snatching. In 2005, he was sent to prison for 18 months for aggravated robbery and he returned to prison in 2009.
But Merah was also known to the authorities because of trips he made to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He had been under surveillance since 2006 and was believed to be a member of the Islamist jihadist movement, Forsane Alliza, which was suspected of fostering violence and terrorism. The organization had been banned in France because it encouraged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan to fight a holy war against coalition forces.
Merah had a history of psychological problems and had tried to hang himself on Christmas Day, 2008. He was described by a psychiatrist he was seeing as having ‘suicidal intentions’ and as a polar introvert. The psychiatrist said that Merah was ‘anxious’ but not psychologically disturbed’. He displayed ‘neurotic fragility due to the departure of his father and lack of supervision on his mother’s part’. His complex personality seems to have
allowed him to be a Muslim and enjoy nightclubs and drink alcohol whilst assembling an arsenal of weapons for the attacks against soldiers that he was planning.
A month after trying to kill himself, Merah tried to enlist in the French army, but his application was rejected. He next tried the Foreign Legion, but left the recruitment centre before being evaluated.
In 2010, he was arrested in Kandahar in Afghanistan while there on a tourist visa and after a trip to Pakistan in 2011, he was followed by the French secret service.
Events leading up to the attacks probably contributed to his increasing sense of injustice. On 24 February 2012, he was imprisoned for a month after being caught driving without a licence. He was due in court again a few months later. Furthermore, he had split from his wife not long before the shootings and had lost his job as a coachbuilder.
A Nationwide Search for the Perpetrator
Following the school shootings, the French authorities launched one of the biggest manhunts in French history. As the victims of the gunman had all been of Jewish or Arabic ethnicity, police initially suspected that the shootings were the work of neo-Nazis. It was a difficult investigation, as Merah had made sure not to leave any shell casings at the scenes and there were no fingerprints or DNA evidence. It was his computer that gave him away, eventually. He had emailed Ibn-Ziaten about the motorbike he was selling and that email led back to an IP address owned by a woman – Merah’s mother – both of whose sons turned out to be on the anti-terrorism watch list.
Merah also made the mistake of asking a motorcycle mechanic in Toulouse to remove a GPS anti-theft tracking device from his scooter. He also told the man that he had recently re-painted the bike.
An hour before police arrived at his apartment, he telephoned the French television show, France 24, and told an editor there that ‘these acts were not only necessary, but that they were to uphold the honour of Islam’. He told the editor that he was against the French banning of the veil and NATO’s operations in Afghanistan. He also claimed to have connections with al Qaeda and promised that there was a lot more to come.
At 3 a.m. on 21 March, officers arrived at Merah’s flat and tried to arrest him. He shot at them through the door, wounding three of them. Meanwhile, the French anti-terrorist unit, RAID (Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence) evacuated and surrounded the apartment block. Inside, Merah’s arsenal consisted of an AK-47, an Uzi, a Sten, a Winchester 12 gauge Pump-action shotgun, three Colt 45s, a 9mm Glock, and a Colt Python .357 Magnum.
He threw the Colt 45 out of the window in exchange for a walkie-talkie with which he could communicate with the authorities. He directed them to a bag containing the film of his attacks – he had carried a camera to each one. Meanwhile, one of his brothers was picked up and his car was found to contain weapons and explosives. His mother refused to become involved because she claimed he would not listen to her.
He promised to give himself up at 10:45 p.m., but then said that he would not give up without a fight. The police then began setting off explosions to intimidate him.
At 10:30 a.m. on the following day 15 specially trained officers entered the flat by the door and the windows. Merah emerged from the bathroom with guns blazing. He leapt from the window, still shooting and was shot in the head by a police sniper. At last, after weeks of rising fear, Mohammed Merah was dead, and France could breathe a sigh of relief.
