French police yesterday shot dead a self-declared Al-Qaeda militant wanted for a series of cold-blooded killings of soldiers and children, ending a tense 32-hour siege in the south of France.

The seven executions by Mohammed Merah shocked the country, home to Western Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim minorities, and raised questions about intolerance and security failures in the midst of a hard-fought presidential election campaign.

Mr Merah, who admitted shooting dead three soldiers, three children and a teacher at a Jewish school, also tried to shoot his way out of the siege in Toulouse after police from the elite RAID force entered his flat.

Officers said the 23-year-old burst out of the bathroom, opening fire on them before jumping out the window of his first-floor apartment in a desperate bid to escape, still firing as he fell.

“He was killed by RAID shooters while trying to flee,” a police source said. “He was dead by the time he hit the ground.”

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said Merah was “shooting very violently” when he burst from the bathroom.

“A RAID officer who is used to this kind of thing told me that he had never seen such a violent assault,” Mr Gueant said.

“RAID officers of course tried to protect themselves and returned fire. Merah jumped out of the window with a gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground.”

Around 300 bullets were fired during the shootout, police sources said.

Merah, who told authorities he had been trained by Al-Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, had previously fought off repeated attempts to storm his apartment after he was tracked down early on Wednesday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed after the end of the siege to crack down on extremism, saying he wanted legal action against people who regularly consult jihadist websites or travel abroad for indoctrination.

“Any person who habitually consults internet sites which praise terrorism and which call for hatred and violence will be punished under criminal law,” he said in a televised address.

Any person who travels abroad for “indoctrination into ideologies which lead to terrorism” will be prosecuted, Mr Sarkozy added and said he was also asking authorities to investigate the promotion of extremism in French prisons.

France’s chief anti-terror prosecutor, François Molins, had earlier described Merah as a cold-blooded killer with no remorse.

“He expressed no regret apart from not having had enough time to kill more victims and even boasted of having brought France to its knees,” Mr Molins told reporters.

Yesterday, the prosecutor confirmed that Merah had filmed all of the killings with a camera attached to a chest harness, and that officers had viewed the footage and confirmed it recorded the crimes.

Mr Molins said Merah had taken responsibility for the shootings, claiming to be avenging Palestinian deaths and opposing the French military’s involvement in Afghanistan and France’s ban on full-face veils.

Killing spree may leave impact on the race for presidency in France

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen says her anti-Islam agenda has been vindicated after a French Muslim claiming ties to Al-Qaeda has taken responsibility for the country’s worst killing spree in years.

The spectre of radical Islam’s grip on France has threatened to shake up France’s presidential race, in which Socialist François Hollande has long been the pollsters’ favourite to unseat the divisive conservative President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Ms Le Pen, the No. 3 candidate in polls, said France must “wipe out” the Islamist threat.

Mr Sarkozy has taken a leaf from Ms Le Pen’s book in campaigning for the presidential election on April 22 and its expected run-off on May 6, with talk of halving immigration and lamenting widespread availability of halal meat.

It is too soon to tell definitively how the two-day stand-off with Mohammed Merah, 23, could affect Mr Sarkozy’s chances for a second term.

A poll released yesterday suggested that Mr Sarkozy may benefit politically from the horror of recent days. The survey by CSA suggested he would lead the first round of voting in April but lose to Mr Hollande in the May run-off by 36 per cent to 45 per cent.

That was the smallest spread yet and the highest score for Mr Sarkozy so far for polls by CSA in this campaign.

Support for Ms Le Pen was notably down.

The poll was conducted on Monday and Tuesday, after a rabbi and three children were shot dead at a Jewish school but before details about the suspect Merah emerged. A total of 1,003 people were questioned by telephone.

In many French minds now lurks the memory of Spain’s 2004 election, which came three days after deadly train bombings in Madrid by Islamic terrorists.

In that case the incumbent conservatives had expected to win but lost at the last minute to the Socialists.

France has an estimated five million Muslims − the largest such population in Western Europe.

The revelation that the chief suspect in three deadly attacks this month in the Toulouse region in southwest France was a Frenchman of Algerian origin who claimed Al-Qaeda ties and travelled twice to Afghanistan resonated among candidates and put Muslims on the defensive.

After authorities identified Merah, Muslim and Jewish leaders joined in a single voice to warn against any bid to stigmatise Islam.

Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the CFCM, an umbrella group for French Muslims, said what the suspect has done “is the very negation of ... Islam”.

The trail of terror

March 11: Imad Ibn Ziaten, a 30-year-old paratrooper, is shot dead in a residential neighbourhood of Toulouse by a man who escapes on a scooter.

March 15: Corporal Abel Chennouf, 25, and Private Mohammed Legouade, 23, are shot dead by a man riding a scooter outside their barracks in Montauban, a town to the north of Toulouse. A third soldier, also shot, is seriously injured. A manhunt is launched.

March 19: A man driving a powerful scooter shoots dead four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse. The dead are 30-year-old teacher Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, five, and Gabriel, four, and seven-year-old Myriam Monsonego, the daughter of the school’s principal.

• The gunman, escapes on a scooter.

• The same weapon was used to kill the victims in all three attacks.

• President Nicolas Sarkozy visits the school and orders the highest terror alert.

World leaders react with outrage to the attacks. Israeli leaders strongly condemn the “despicable murder of Jews”, while UN chief Ban Ki-moon condemns “in the strongest possible terms” the killings outside the Jewish school. The Vatican describes it as a “heinous” act.

March 20: Schools throughout France observe a minute’s silence. The bodies of the adult and three children killed at the Jewish school, all of whom have double French and Israeli citizenship, are flown to Israel for burial. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe accomp-anies them.

March 21: Officials say Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent who claims links to Al-Qaeda, is believed to be the killer.