Sarkozy: Shootings were a ‘French tragedy’

The French republic as a whole was the victim of the al-Qaeda-linked gunman who killed seven people this week, President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a funeral service for three murdered paratroopers in Montauban on Wednesday.

Front National leader and presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and other French political leaders were also in attendance.

Sarkozy called the shootings of the paratroopers, along with the murder of four more people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, a “French tragedy.”

“They were gunned down because they were French soldiers; they were gunned down because they were [members of] the French army. It is the French army that the killer was targeting, and it is the French republic that was hit,” said Sarkozy.

“Whatever the color of their skin, or their creed, they wore the same uniform and were prepared to die for the heart of our army,” Sarkozy said.  “It is to that army that I wish to pay attribute. The whole French nation is at your side.”

“Families are decimated forever. Its children, soldiers, French people… were our soldiers. These children were our children.” He called for national unity after the horror of the attacks.

Montauban, a close-knit military town in southwest France, was the site of one of the recent shootings by a gunman believed to be Mohammed Merah.

Seven French nationals — three of them paratroopers — were killed by the gunman in three shootings over the past 10 days. The soldiers were reported to be part of an elite anti-mine unit. Two of them were Muslims and one of them was from the West Indies. A fourth paratrooper was also seriously wounded.

The first incident was on March 11, when the gunman shot an out-of-uniform French soldier in Toulouse. He fled the scene on his motorbike. Four days later he shot three uniformed soldiers outside their barracks in Montauban 50 kilometers away, killing two and seriously injuring one, and again fled on his motorbike.

That motorbike proved critical to locating Merah. French authorities said he is believed to have visited a local motorbike shop to have a piece of the bike fixed, which gave the authorities new information in their pursuit of the suspect.

Merah, 24, is of French nationality. “He is believed to belong to al-Qaeda,” Interior Minister Claude Gueant told reporters at the scene of the Jewish school where Merah shot to death a rabbi, his two sons, and an eight-year-old girl. Merah had been under surveillance for years after spending time in training camps in Afghanistan. Investigators said the murders were carried out by an individual who was “cold and determined.”

He called the France24 TV station early Wednesday to claim responsibility, and said that the terror cell he belonged to — Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride) — didn’t have the money or the weapons to carry out the attack earlier. He claimed to be avenging the war in Afghanistan and the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza.