Children aged 3, 6, 10 killed at French school: prosecutor

19 March 2012 - 14:36 By Sapa-AFP and Sapa-AP
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Children aged three, six and 10, and a religious education teacher were killed in Monday's shooting at a Jewish school in southwestern France, the local prosecutor said.

Witnesses and parents of pupils said earlier that a teacher and his two children were among the victims in the attack in the city of Toulouse, the third shooting in a week in the region by a man who fled on a motorbike.

The shooter drove away on a scooter, a national police official in Paris said. The official did not wish to be named in line with departmental rules.

Police cordoned off the private school in the northeast of Toulouse, and some two hours after the shooting children were still in the school.

President Nicolas Sarkozy accompanied by Richard Prasquier, the president of CRIF, the umbrella group representing Jewish organisations, were heading to the site of the private school, the president's office and CRIF said.

The shooting occurred about 8:10am just ahead of the start of classes in most schools.

The shooting happened in the same area where a gunman on a motorbike opened fire on three uniformed paratroopers at a bank machine on Thursday, killing two and critically wounding the other. The attack in the town of Montauban occurred not far from the soldiers' barracks. Four days earlier, a gunman on a motorbike shot and killed another paratrooper in Toulouse, about 50 kilometres away.

Authorities said at the time that forensic analysis showed that the same weapon was used in the shootings in Montauban and Toulouse.

It was not immediately clear if all three shootings are related.

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