AFP:
"Shots rang out Wednesday as French police surrounded a self-declared member of the Al-Qaeda network holed up in a house after a series of shooting attacks that shocked the nation.
Police sources told AFP that officers investigating three recent attacks in which a gunman killed three soldiers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi sealed off an address in the Cote Pavee residential district of Toulouse.
Six or seven shots rang out, an AFP reporter at the scene said, but the area had been sealed off by police, including members of the RAID special weapons squad, and it was not immediately clear whether the siege was over.
"The suspect's mother was brought to the scene. She was asked to make contact with her son, to reason with him, but she did not want to, saying she had little influence on him," Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
"This person has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past ... and says he belongs to Al-Qaeda and says he wanted to avenge Palestinian children and to attack the French army," Gueant said, as the operation continued.
"He has links with people involved in jihadism and salafism," he added, referring to two strains of Muslim thought that have influenced Al-Qaeda.
Briefing reporters near the scene, Gueant said that the suspect's brother had been arrested while checks are carried out, although he confirmed that only one suspect had been at the scenes of the shootings.
"Today there are several operations being carried out at the same time in the Toulouse metropolitan area," prosecutor Olivier Christen said.
Two police were slightly wounded as the raids got underway, a source said.
A source close to the inquiry said earlier that the suspect had exchanged words with the RAID team and had declared himself to be a member of Al-Qaeda, the armed Islamist group founded by late Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden."
NYT:
"TOULOUSE, France — Elite police officers raided a residence in Toulouse early Wednesday in pursuit of a 24-year-old man claiming ties to Al Qaeda and suspected in the killings this week of three young children and a rabbi at a nearby Jewish school, French officials said.
The man told police negotiators that those killings, as well as the shooting deaths of three French soldiers in recent days, were meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French involvement in the Afghanistan war, according to investigators and Interior Minister Claude Guéant, who was at the site of the raid on Wednesday morning.
The suspect fired several times at security forces ringing the residence in which he had barricaded himself in the neighborhood of Côte Pavée, about two miles south of the Jewish school where the four people were killed on Monday. Two officers were wounded, Mr. Guéant said."