• On the occasion of its 20th anniversary,

    20 Minutes

     shares with you the most striking memories of its journalists.

  • Today, back to the sad month of March 2012. After having already perpetrated two attacks in Toulouse and Montauban the previous week, Mohammed Merah went on Monday March 19 to a Jewish school and killed three children and a teacher.

2012, March 19, 2012. Shots rang out in the morning in a Toulouse Jewish school, near the Roseraie metro station.

Our communication correspondent within the police confirms the information to me and from his agitation on the phone, I feel that it is very serious.

When I arrived, at the top of rue Jules-Dalou, shortly before 9 am, I saw a security cordon.

Massed behind, waiting to be able to join their children, parents as paralyzed, sometimes shaken by sobs.

And below this sloping lane, in front of the entrance gate, white sheets on the ground with policemen in white coveralls around.

It's hard to understand what you're up against, to tell yourself that it's children who are there, especially when you're a mom yourself, it seems so unthinkable.

Until someone comes to tell the parents who are the victims of this incredible massacre.

I can still hear the cries of a mother, chanting “Myriami”, the name of this little 8-year-old girl whose life had just been taken away.

I remember the haggard looks of these students dribbling out throughout the morning.

During the presidential campaign

Tension also within the police, even among those who were thought to be seasoned in all situations and in whose eyes we can read the horror of the situation.

Nervousness increased by the arrival on site of the President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, of his ministers whose security had to be organised.

But also that of François Hollande, because in this month of March 2012, the presidential election campaign is in full swing.

A press conference is improvised on a piece of sidewalk by the secretary general of the prefecture, Françoise Souliman, who details the arrangements made to secure the other Jewish establishments in the city because the killer is still on the run.

"He shot everything in front of him", explains Michel Valet, clearly establishing the link with the attacks of the soldiers the previous days: same weapon, same modus operandi, same way of getting around on a scooter.

He then introduces us to François Molins, his Parisian counterpart, whose face reappeared regularly on television sets during the decade that followed, marked by a wave of Islamist terrorist attacks.

Behind this word terrorism, we think of the attacks perpetrated against institutions,

Our file on the Merah case

During this crazy day, I met in the middle of the court of Ozar Hatorah the president of the representative council of the Jewish institutions of Toulouse, whom I knew.

Nicole Yardeni had tears in her eyes and told me she had just seen the indescribable CCTV footage.

That of a killer who went so far as to pursue a little girl before coldly killing her with a bullet in the head.

These words sum up the dread that gripped me on March 19, 2012, but also the following days marked by the hunt for Mohammed Merah.

Society

Mohammed Merah attacks: Jonathan, former student of Ozar Hatorah, "measures the gift that it can be to live"

Society

Attacks by Mohammed Merah: "There is no spontaneous generation of terrorism", according to Mathieu Guidère

  • Occitania

  • Merah case

  • Terrorist attack

  • Society

  • Toulouse

  • Terrorism

  • 0 comment

  • 0 share

    • Share on Messenger

    • Share on Facebook

    • Share on Twitter

    • Share on Flipboard

    • Share on Pinterest

    • Share on Linkedin

    • Send by Mail

  • To safeguard

  • A fault ?

  • To print