France's interior minister says the chief suspect in al-Qaeda-linked shootings who is holed up in an apartment wants to 'die with weapons in his hands'.
Claude Gueant said on Thursday morning on RTL radio that they have not had contact with him since Wednesday night. Gueant said authorities are still hoping to take him alive.
Hundreds of French police have surrounded the apartment since the early hours of Wednesday and are working to try to capture suspect Mohamed Merah.
Police were using their advantages - numbers, firepower and psychological pressure - in hopes of wearing down the 24-year-old suspect, who is holed up in an apartment in the southwestern French city.
Authorities say Merah has boasted about carrying out the shootings of three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi, and three French paratroopers in three separate incidents during the past two weeks.
They are believed to be the first incidents of killings inspired by Islamic radical motives in France in more than a decade.
Elite police squads set off sporadic blasts throughout the night and into the morning - some that blew off the apartment's shutters - in what officials described as a tactic aimed to pressure Merah to give up.
Holed up alone in an otherwise evacuated apartment building, Merah appeared to toy with police negotiators - first saying he would surrender in the afternoon, then under the cover of darkness, then reneging on those pledges altogether, officials said.
Authorities said the shooter, a French citizen of Algerian descent, had been to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he claimed to have received training from al-Qaeda.
They said he told negotiators he killed a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school on Monday and three French paratroopers last week to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest the French army's involvement in Afghanistan, as well as a government ban last year on face-covering Islamic veils.
"He has no regrets, except not having more time to kill more people and he boasts that he has brought France to its knees," prosecutor Francois Molins told a news conference on Wednesday.
French authorities - like others across Europe - have long been concerned about "lone-wolf" attacks by young, internet-savvy militants who find radical beliefs online since they are harder to find and track.
Merah espoused a radical brand of Islam and had been to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region twice and to the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan for training, Molins said.
He said the suspect had plans to kill another soldier - prompting the police raid at around 3am on Wednesday. After it erupted into a firefight, wounding two police, a standoff ensued with on-and-off negotiations with the suspect that lasted through the night.
As darkness fell, police cut electricity and gas to the building, then quietly closed in to wait out the suspect.
The gunman's brother and mother were detained early on Wednesday. Molins said the 29-year-old brother, Abdelkader, had been implicated in a 2007 network that sent militant fighters to Iraq, but was never charged.
The siege was part of France's biggest manhunt since a wave of terrorist attacks in the 1990s by Algerian extremists.
The chase began after France's worst-ever school shooting on Monday and two previous attacks on paratroopers beginning March 11 - killings that have horrified the country and frozen campaigning for the French presidential election next month.
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