TOULOUSE, France — Police searched southern France on Tuesday for an expert gunman suspected of fatally shooting seven people in the head at close range in attacks that may have been motivated by neo-Nazi ties or grudges against minorities.
The shooter is suspected of carrying out three deadly attacks: leaving four people dead Monday at a Jewish school in Toulouse, three of them young children; killing two French paratroopers and seriously wounding another Thursday in nearby Montauban; and fatally shooting another paratrooper in Toulouse on March 11.
All the victims in the school attack were Jewish with dual French-Israeli citizenship, and the paratroopers were of North African or French Caribbean origin.
The shots were fired at such close range that the gunfire burned the skin, prosecutor Francois Molins said Tuesday.
He added the crimes appear to be premeditated because of the killer’s “choices of victims and the choices of his targets” — the army, the foreign origin of the victims or their religion.
The killer could “act again,” he said.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant described the suspect as “someone very cold, very determined, very much a master of his movements, and by consequence, very cruel.”
On Tuesday night, the school-attack victims were flown to Israel for burial there, accompanied by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe.
A funeral is being held today in Montauban for the paratroopers.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has raised the terror alert for the southwest region to scarlet, the highest level on the four-color scale that automatically added 14 new units of riot police and gendarmes to the region.
In the hunt for the shooter, the focus fell Tuesday on three paratroopers who had been expelled from their regiment near Toulouse in 2008 for neo-Nazi sympathies.
