Toulouse siege: interactive graphic - Telegraph Mohamed Merah, an Islamic extremist who boasted of killing seven people to strike back at France, was shot in the head by police as he jumped out of his apartment after a fierce gunfight with police. His dramatic death ended a more than 32-hour standoff with an elite police squad trying to capture him alive. The 23-year-old suspect was wanted in the deaths of three paratroopers, three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi - all killed since March 11 in what he reportedly told police was an attempt to "bring France to its knees." Prosecutor Francois Molins said Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent who claimed links to al-Qaeda, burst out of his bathroom when police entered his apartment Thursday morning, wildly firing his handgun about 30 times and jumping out an apartment window. Merah continued to fire "until he was hit by a retaliatory shot from the RAID (elite police unit), which felled him with a bullet to the head," Molins said.