French police in talks with shooting suspect

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Police in the French city of Toulouse have surrounded a man suspected to be behind Monday's killing of four people outside a Jewish school and that of three soldiers a few days earlier.

Claude Gueant, the French interior minister, said the 24-year-old suspect had in negotiations with the police agreed to give himself up in the afternoon.

"He said...he will turn himself in this afternoon," Gueant told BFM television, adding that the police were determined to take him alive so that he could stand trial.

A police source identified the suspect as Mohammed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, the AFP news agency reported.

Gunshots were heard after the police raided the five-storey building at 03:00am (0200 GMT) on Wednesday.Three policemen were reportedly injured in the shootout after the suspect shot through the door.

The suspect later exchanged one of his weapons for a cellphone. The police, however, said he still had several weapons.

The mother of the suspect had arrived at the scene to negotiate a surrender.

Brother arrested

Speaking to journalists, Gueant said the suspect was a French man and and "he belongs to al-Qaeda."

He said the suspect wanted to "take revenge for Palestinian children" killed in the Middle East, and was angry at the French military for its operations abroad.

Michael Stephens, a researcher with the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar, however, told Al Jazeera the interior minister needed to step back until there was more evidence.

"There is very little evidence of organisational structure behind the attack. It is more likely he was acting alone and radicalised by al-Qaeda ideas," he said.

Gueant further added that the man's brother was arrested and he was known to authorities for having spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland, reporting from Toulouse, said the operation was ongoing.

The raid came as three children and a rabbi gunned down outside the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse were buried in Israel.

The bodies had earlier arrived in Israel after being flown by Israeli El Al airlines.

Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, along with 50 relatives and friends of the victims accompanied the bodies as they were flown home.

Jonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old Frenchman, his two sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4 as well as seven-year-old Myriam Monsonego were buried at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem.

President Nicolas Sarkozy paid silent homage to the victims on Tuesday at a school in Paris close to the city's Holocaust memorial, and afterwards admitted that authorities had as yet no clue as to the identity of the killer.

"Anti-Semitism is obvious. The Jewish school attack was an anti-Semitic crime," Sarkozy told reporters at the Paris school after meeting children.

Attack on soldiers

French investigators fear the same gunman also killed three soldiers in two recent separate attacks.

The soldiers were French citizens of North African origin, while another who was critically wounded in the attack was black and from the French West Indies.

French police on Monday launched a huge manhunt after the shooting, and the region was put on its highest level of security alert.

Police said that the same weapon and the same stolen scooter appeared to have been used in all three attacks.

All three attacks were carried out by the rider using a .45-calibre weapon, who witnesses described as calmly shooting his victims.

The gunman may also have recorded the attack with an extreme sports video camera strapped to his chest, the French interior minister said.

"A witness saw a small video camera around the killer's neck," Gueant told Europe 1 radio on Tuesday.

"It's a video camera worn in a harness on the chest and indeed he was seen, a witness said so, with this device," Gueant said. "I don't know if he filmed everything."

All seven people slain in three attacks were shot in the head at point blank range, the prosecutor leading the investigation said on Tuesday.

Separatly, a package bomb exploded at the Indonesian embassy in Paris on Wednesday, causing minor damage but no injuries, police said.

"We received information at 5 am Paris time that there was a bomb," Teuku Faizasyah, spokesman for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said. "We're still looking for clarity whether we are really a target or not."