WALLER, Texas — (DMN) – A 22-year old Texas man suspected of murdering his parents and older brother tearfully confessed to investigators Wednesday that he was planning a much larger, Columbine-style attack at Waller High School when he opened fire on his family, law enforcement sources have said. Trey Sesler reportedly opened up to investigators at the Waller County Jail, where he’s been held since his arrest Tuesday evening.
According to investigators, Sesler said he killed his parents and brother because he didn’t want them to be ashamed of what he was about to do. He said he’d been shooting livestock to build up courage for a Columbine-style mass-shooting at a nearby campus. Investigators did not say what school Sesler allegedly had in mind. Sesler posted videos of himself firing weapons on YouTube prior to the triple homicide, and investigators said they were working to determine if he had any supporters or accomplices in his activities. “If you come to that point, what do you have on your mind,” Waller County Sheriff R. Glenn Smith said. “I certainly don’t think it was something that just happened, all of a sudden, in one bad argument. These kinds of things, probably something had been going on with his young man for a while.”
Sesler was arrested Tuesday night, just hours after police found the bodies of his parents – Lawton Ray and Rhonda Wyse Sesler – and his brother, 26-year-old Mark Alan Sesler, at their home in Waller. Police are not sure exactly when the victims were shot, but said it could have been as early as Monday afternoon. Police were called to the home by concerned family members around 1 p.m. Tuesday. Investigators described the gruesome scene as a “war zone.” “The best way for me to describe the residence is it looked like a war zone – a tremendous amount of damage inside the residence, the crime scene was not contained to one area of the residence. It was from one end of the residence to the other, front to back, which is unusual,” Waller Police Chief Phil Rehak said.
Texas Rangers quickly tracked Trey Sesler down at a friend’s house near Magnolia after spotting his car outside the residence. They said he had two guns on him at the time — one inside, and one in his car. Family members said the young suspect was suffering from some type of mental illness. But investigators said they have no idea what exactly might be wrong. Sesler’s Facebook page offered no hint of what was to come. He wrote: “I’m Trey, no nicknames or anything. I really like to take it easy and have a nice time. I’m really interested in my education as a college student and am really excited about graduating in a few years. I plant things sometimes in the spring like peppers and strawberries. My car is currently the most exciting part of my days. Please to meet you though, take it easy.”
The FBI was called in Wednesday to assist with the investigation, and officers were searching Sesler’s grandmother’s home in Hempstead for evidence. He will be arraigned on capital murder charges Thursday morning, police said. Trey Sesler’s Facebook page indicates that he attended Waller High School. Area residents said he had a job delivering pizzas. Sesler did not have a violent criminal record and Waller police had no history of officers responding to the home before this week.
CBS 11 (KHOU) and The Houston Chronicle contributed to this report.
JACKSON, Mississippi — (DMN/CNN) – A white Mississippi man has been sentenced to life in prison for the 2011 murder of an African-American man, with the judge calling it an inexcusable, “despicable” crime. Deryl Dedmon pleaded guilty to murder and a hate-crime charge before a judge in Jackson on Wednesday afternoon, admitting to the June killing of James Craig Anderson. Hinds County Circuit Judge Jeff Weill sentenced him to two concurrent life terms, saying, “This craven act isn’t who we are.” “Whatever excuse you offer, forget that. There is no excuse,” Weill said. He added, “The state of Mississippi condemns this despicable crime.”
Dedmon, 19, told the judge that he was a “changed man” who had found religion since his arrest. “I wish I could take it all back,” he said, adding, “I was young and dumb, ignorant and full of hatred. I chose to go down the wrong path.” Dedmon is also expected to plead guilty to still-undisclosed federal charges Thursday, three sources with knowledge of the case told CNN — the first indication that a federal case was pending in Anderson’s death. Officials would disclose no details, but Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith said he expected other charges — and other arrests. “This is just the beginning,” Smith said.
Anderson’s killing prompted several large marches and prayer vigils in Jackson, a city of about 537,000 people. His sister, Barbara Anderson Young, said during Wednesday’s hearing that her family was praying for “racial conciliation.” “These last months have been very difficult,” Young said. “We cried. We wept. We reminisced about our beloved brother, Craig, a loss I cannot even explain. Craig was a big-hearted person who loved his fellow man.” Anderson died after he was beaten and run over by a truck driven by Dedmon, according to police. Dedmon was part of a group of seven white youths from largely white Rankin County who decided to “go f**k with some niggers,” after a night of partying and drinking, law enforcement officials have said, quoting some of the suspects in the case.
Smith has said the evidence indicated the suspects, who ranged in age from 17 to 19, “went out with the intention to harm and, in this case, kill a black man.” According to investigators, they drove 16 miles in two vehicles from Rankin County to Jackson, where after exiting the highway, they found Anderson alone in a parking lot about 4 a.m. on June 26.
The white men allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelling racial epithets. After the beating, Dedmon drove his Ford F-250 truck over him, leaving him to die, according to what some of the teens cooperating with police have told authorities. Anderson’s death drew national attention after CNN first reported it and aired exclusive surveillance video of the killing, captured by a parking lot security camera in a Jackson suburb. A second man, John Aaron Rice, was initially charged with murder, but a judge reduced the charges to simple assault because Rice was not believed to be driving the vehicle used to kill Anderson.
For months, lawyers had been working behind the scenes in Jackson, where Dedmon is being held, fighting over a change of venue in a possible trial. Smith had hoped to have a trial in Jackson, where the crime occurred and which is largely black. But defense attorneys wanted to move the trial to an area with a larger white population, the law enforcement officials said. Authorities believe Dedmon led and instigated the attack. On a sweltering Mississippi night in June, a gang of youths climbed into Dedmon’s green truck and a white SUV and drove to the western edge of Jackson. They would have seen Anderson immediately as they exited the highway, officials said. He was standing in a hotel parking lot just beyond the exit ramp.
On the videotape obtained exclusively by CNN, the group pulls into the parking lot and stops where Anderson is standing, although he is just off camera and not visible. The young men can then be seen going back and forth between their cars and Anderson. Witnesses told authorities this is when Anderson’s beating took place, as the white youths yelled racial epithets, including “white power.” Authorities allege Dedmon and many of the other teens pummeled Anderson repeatedly as he crumpled to the ground, although this is not visible on the tape. After the beating, some of the white youths left, and others got into the green Ford truck.
At this moment, Anderson becomes visible on the tape as he staggers into view and walked toward the truck. “Defendant Dedmon drove the F-250 out of the parking lot and turned right onto Ellis Avenue,” the lawsuit says. “Just as Dedmon turned right, his headlights shone directly on Anderson, who, having been severely beaten, was stumbling in a grassy area near the motel’s entrance. Dedmon accelerated, drove onto and over the street curb, and struck Anderson with the front of the F-250.” Shortly afterward, Dedmon allegedly boasted and laughed about the killing, according to statements some of the teens made to detectives. “I ran that nigger over,” he allegedly said in a phone conversation to the youths in the other car. “He was not remorseful,” Smith said. “He was laughing, laughing about the killing.” But during a bail hearing last year, Dedmon’s attorney told the court he saw nothing to back up the “racial allegations.”
The U.S. Justice Department had been looking into the death as a possible federal hate crime and assisting local prosecutors. Federal investigators also have been digging for months into other possible crimes in the area committed by Dedmon and others that might show a pattern of racial violence. Anderson’s family had asked state and federal officials not to seek the death penalty against Dedmon or any other youths who might be charged in the case, saying they oppose capital punishment in part because of their religious faith. The family also filed a wrongful death suit against all seven of the white youths who were present at the beating of Anderson. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nationally recognized organization in Montgomery, Alabama, that opposes racism and intolerance, joined in the lawsuit to help the case, joining forces with the family’s attorney, Winston J. Thompson III. “James Anderson lost his life for no other reason than the color of his skin,” said Morris Dees, chief trial counsel for the law center . “Those responsible must be held accountable for their callous and deadly actions. We are filing this lawsuit today to ensure his family gets a measure of justice.”
Anderson, a line worker at a Nissan plant, sang in his church choir, Thompson said. He is survived by his partner of 17 years. “He was just a pillar of the community,” Thompson said. “He paid his taxes on time; he went to work, came home — he was just an average, ordinary citizen, good guy, wonderful gardener.”
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The best thing about conspiracy theories is that they don’t require a shred of truth. They can take on a life of their own even after being vetted and re-vetted by people who are out to prove that the truth is not the truth. One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Keep in mind this issue has been before the United States Supreme Court. It has withstood the political campaign of 2008 when Obama had Democrats and Republicans who would have done anything to keep him out of the White House. It doesn’t matter though, just like those who think the CIA killed JFK there will always be those who insist the President is a Kenyan.
The mainstream media has been derided by right wing nut job extremists as being in complicity in the greatest cover-up in modern times. Again, throw logic and vetting out the window, right wing fanatics don’t want to hear it. Assuming the American media is complicit in the biggest conspiracy of the 21st Century which put a Kenyan in the White House to destroy America, I found a piece running out of the United Kingdom. It will be hard to accuse the Guardian of being complicit, after all, they are a foreign entity.
It’s hard work being a conspiracy theorist. Just look at Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-styled tough guy of American policing, who has released the preliminary results of his “birther” investigation into whether Barack Obamais a true American. The details of the inquiry – announced at a packed press conference in Arizona – were enough to make you want to lie down in a darkened room for a week just to recover from the terrible exertion of it all. And that’s even before you hear his conclusion: that Obama’s birth certificate is probably a computer-generated fraud.
A stream of conspiratorialists as numerous as the Dead Sea Scrolls have already been down this road, of course, led by that epitome of investigative integrity Donald Trump. But leaving that aside, let’s look at Arpaio’s inquiry and the extraordinary lengths it took. It all began when Arpaio received a delegation of 250 Tea Party members from his district of Maricopa county pleading with him to save America from the disaster of an alien president. It was an appeal, he told the Guardian, that he could not ignore. “I’m not the kind of guy who turns his back on people when they ask for help,” he said.
Arpaio is the “tough on crime” Sheriff who makes his inmates wear pink underwear.
So off he goes and pulls together what he calls a “cold case posse” of his mates – former cops, other law enforcers, and journalists. Arpaio’s inquiry had nothing at all to do with the fact that he is currently himself under investigation by the US department of justice – ie, the Obama administration – for blatant racial profiling in his police district. “This has nothing to do with politics!” he bellowed at the press conference. “If we could find evidence that the president was born in this country, I would be very happy.” (Odd that he said that. He looked so very, very happy to be announcing in front of the nation’s TV cameras that they had uncovered the exact opposite.)
Arpaio’s “posse” was an assemblage of individuals with impeccable objective track records. Take the lead journalist, Jerome Corsie. He writes for the right-wing blog WorldNetDaily.com and is author of the conspiracy book Obama Nation. The posse set to work, coming up with a mass of acronyms, jargon, and gobbledygook which they put together in a series of videos projected at the press conferece. Warning: at this point in the proceedings, you really need high energy levels:
• First, they tested a “genuine” birth cerficate to see how it was put together. They stripped away the green background, photocopied the certificate on green basket-weave safety paper (Lord only knows why), then scanned it into a computer and opened it in Adobe Illustrator.
The result? A document in which the texture of the paper can be seen under the ink, with just one layer and noise consistent through the document.
• Then they did the same with the Obama birth certificate posted on the White House website on 27 April 2011. What did they find? Oh fraud most foul and unnatural! They discovered not one but NINE layers in which parts of the certificate had been put together separately, as well as noise that was not evenly distributed as it should have been.
• Finally, they look at Obama’s selective service card and shows that that too is not only forged but is – gasp! – “poorly forged!” Gadzooks, if someone is going to launch a conspiracy to put a foreigner in the White House, they could at least do it properly.
So what are we to conclude from all this? Not, Arpaio insisted over and over again, that anyone – least of all him – is accusing Obama of being a liar and a fraud. Oh, no. “I am not accusing the president of any crime. All I’m saying is that we seem to have documents that are forged. We need to find out who committed these crimes.” So that’s all clear then. Somehow one has to assume that this isn’t the last we’ve heard from Arpaio and his disinterested cold case posse.
TOULOUSE, France — (DMN/BBC) – The Frenchman suspected of a spate of shootings in the Toulouse area planned more killings, prosecutors have said. Anti-terror chief Francois Molins said the suspect, named as Mohammed Merah, 23, of Algerian descent, intended to kill a soldier and two police officers. Merah, who says he was trained by al-Qaeda, is suspected of murdering three soldiers and four Jewish people. Police have surrounded his flat and are trying to persuade him to surrender. He is said to be heavily armed. Earlier reports said he had been captured, but officials later rebuffed the claims.
The killings took place in and around Toulouse in three separate incidents earlier this month. On 11 March, a soldier was shot and killed while waiting to see a man about selling his motorcycle. Days later, two soldiers were shot and killed, and a third was wounded while waiting at a cash machine. Then earlier this week, three children and an adult were shot and killed outside a Jewish school. The four Jewish victims were buried in an emotional funeral in Jerusalem earlier.
In a news conference, Mr Molins said Merah had planned to kill a soldier later on Wednesday and also had plans to target the police. “If he’s telling the truth, he would have left his house this morning and he would have once again killed any soldier that he came across,” the prosecutor said. Mr Molins said the suspect had expressed no regret for the killings, but had said he wanted to kill more people and “bring France to its knees”. President Nicolas Sarkozy has attended a memorial at a military base in nearby Montauban for the three murdered soldiers. He earlier told Jewish community leaders that the gunmen had been planning more attacks before police had surrounded his apartment block.
Police moved into Merah’s block after two officers were shot at when they tried to get into his flat. Officials say he is heavily armed with a Kalashnikov high-velocity rifle, a mini-Uzi 9mm machine pistol, several handguns and possibly grenades. The five-storey block of flats was evacuated earlier, and police were also moving residents of nearby buildings. Hundreds of officers are now stationed outside the block. Elsewhere in the city, police are hunting for accomplices and have detained several members of his family. His mother was taken to the scene in the hope that she could persuade him to surrender, but she told police that she had no influence over her son.
At the scene
Richard Galpin BBC News, Toulouse
Just after President Sarkozy arrived in Toulouse for meetings at a military barracks close to where the siege is taking place, reports began circulating that it was all over, Mohammed Merah had been arrested. But minutes later came the denials. First by local officials in Toulouse, then by the interior minister himself. It all added to the tension. How will the siege which began at 3am local time on Wednesday morning, be brought to an end?
Officially the French government says it wants to capture him alive so that he can stand trial on charges of murdering seven people and injuring at least two others. But it will not be an easy operation if he decides to stand and fight. He is reported to have an automatic rifle, a sub machinegun and grenades inside his apartment.
Negotiators have been talking to Merah all morning, but officials said he appeared to have no particular demands. The suspect has said he acted to “avenge Palestinian children” and said he would give himself up. Merah claimed to have received al-Qaeda training in Pakistan’s Waziristan area, and also said he had been to Afghanistan, prosecutors said. Afghan officials told the BBC he had been jailed in Kandahar for planting bombs in 2007, but escaped in a Taliban-led break-out in 2008. Other Afghan sources cast doubt on the claims, saying the man jailed in Kandahar might have been a different person with the same name.
Mr Molins said Merah had visited Afghanistan twice. He gave no details of the first visit, but said that during his second trip last year, Merah was captured by Afghan forces and handed to the Americans, who put him on a plane back to France. But American officials told CNN that US forces had not dealt with Merah, and that the Afghans had handed him to French forces, who had returned him to France.
Mohammed Merah:
Mohammed Merah, the man believed to be the gunman on a scooter who killed seven people in south-western France, is a 23-year-old French citizen of Algerian extraction. Before the shootings in Toulouse and Montauban, he was brought to French attention because of visits he made to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was also known to the French authorities because he had a criminal record for non-terrorist crimes. Police surrounded him at a block of flats in Toulouse after the shootings, in which three French soldiers and a rabbi and three Jewish children were killed.
According to French prosecutors, he has expressed no regrets other than “not having claimed more victims” and is proud of having “brought France to its knees”. He said he had been motivated by the fate of the Palestinians, the French military presence in Afghanistan and France’s ban on the full veil, prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters. Earlier, the suspect had reportedly described himself as an Islamist warrior and member of the al-Qaeda network. French news channel BFM TV said he was linked to Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride), an Islamist group banned last month in France.
French broadcaster France 24 said it had received a call from a man claiming to be the gunman. He allegedly told a journalist he had “filmed all the murders” and that the videos “would be posted online shortly”. The suspect is from Toulouse where he grew up on the Izards housing estate, according to French newspaper JDD. He later moved into the block of flats on Sergent Vigne Street, in a quiet part of the city, where he was surrounded by police. A neighbour described him as a “quiet man with a beard” who had “never done anything special”.
Armed police in the French city of Toulouse have sealed off a block of flats where a man suspected of killing seven people is hiding.
From a family of five children, the suspect is a mechanic by trade, according to French magazine Le Point. With 18 acts of violence on his record, he was considered a juvenile delinquent, and served two short prison terms, in 2007 and 2009. However, two of his friends said he was a “nice guy” who “got on well with everyone”, JDD reports. One of them, Samir, said Mohammed Merah had been seen in a Toulouse night club only last week. “I served in the army and he never said anything to me about it,” he added. “I am also shocked he killed North Africans. We can’t believe it.”
An unnamed young man who ran into him in a rai (popular Arab music) night club around the time of the first shooting painted a different picture for the French magazine Nouvel Observateur. “He’s a waster, a layabout,” he said. “A loner. Not a serious guy… Sometimes he had his hair long, sometimes short, sometimes red.” Mohammed Merah visited Pakistan twice, in 2010 and 2011, French reports say. According to French newspaper Le Monde, he trained with militants in Pakistan before crossing the border, where at one stage he was stopped by an Afghan police patrol. He was not arrested but the police reported his nationality to the Western authorities, Le Monde says.
Mohammed Merah
French citizen of Algerian extraction, aged 23
Has criminal record in France for non-terrorist crimes
Has described himself as an al-Qaeda member and has spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Other French sources say he was arrested in Kandahar at the end of 2010 on a non-terrorist charge. However, BBC News has learnt that he may have been in the region as early as 2007, when a militant of Algerian origin was jailed in Afghanistan for planting improvised explosive devices. That prisoner escaped in a jailbreak the following year. In the days before French police closed in on him, Mohammed Merah was seen by a neighbour praying on a football pitch near his block of flats. He reportedly became radicalised years ago while serving a brief prison sentence for a violent crime, Le Point says.
When his mother was asked by police to assist in police negotiations, she reportedly refused, saying she no longer had any influence over her son. French lawyer Christian Etelin, who defended the suspect in non-terrorist proceedings in recent years, told AFP he had not given the impression of being a fanatic and had never talked about Islam to him. “But two years ago I learnt that he had suddenly become radicalised and had left for Afghanistan,” the lawyer added. After the first two shootings, in Toulouse and Montauban, the suspect was “in the sights” of France’s domestic intelligence service, the DCRI, along with others, an unnamed official told AFP news agency. A crucial piece of evidence appears to have been an email account used to contact the first shooting victim, who had advertised a motorcycle online.
In this Sept. 26, 2010, file photo, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton and defensive coordinator Gregg Williams during their NFL football game at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — (DMN/CNN) – New Orleans Saints Head Coach Sean Payton was suspended for the entire 2012 season and the team was fined $500,000 for operating a bounty program against opponents, under sweeping discipline announced by the NFL on Wednesday. Under the program, the team paid bonuses for knocking opposing players out of a game. Former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, now with the St. Louis Rams, was suspended indefinitely from the NFL, effective immediately, the league said. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will review Williams’ status at the season and whether to reinstate him, the league said. The team will also forfeit its second-round draft picks in 2012 and 2013.
Saints General Manager Mickey Loomis was suspended without pay for the first eight regular-season games of the 2012 season, the NFL said. Assistant Head Coach Joe Vitt was suspended without pay for the first six regular-season games, the league said. One sports analyst, Jim Trotter of Sports Illustrated, said the discipline is “historic.” “One of the reasons they could be so strong against the Saints was that there was a paper trail,” Trotter said, referring to e-mails. “I don’t think other teams would be dumb enough to put it in writing,” Trotter said of the bounty system. “I definitely believe they are trying to make an example of them.”
The NFL is facing class-action lawsuits from former players who claimed that their efforts led to concussions, head trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a dementia-like brain disease. “The league has to be concerned about lawsuits,” Trotter said. The NFL investigation found the Saints had an “active bounty program” during the 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons in which “bounty” payments were paid for “knock-outs” and “cart-offs” — plays in which an opposing player had to leave the game, the league said in a statement. The bounties even identified specific players as targets, the league said.
The investigation found that the Saints showed “a deliberate effort to conceal the program’s existence from league investigators, and a clear determination to maintain the program despite express direction from Saints ownership that it stop as well as ongoing inquiries from the league office,” the NFL said. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the “pay-for-performance” program “undermined the integrity of the game.” The league found that Payton failed to supervise players and coaches, didn’t inquire into the facts of the bounty program though he was aware of the league’s inquiries, and encouraged “the false denials by instructing assistants to ‘make sure our ducks are in a row,’ ” the NFL statement said.
Goodell described the Saints’ violations of league rules “particularly unusual and egregious.” “When there is targeting of players for injury and cash rewards over a three-year period, the involvement of the coaching staff, and three years of denials and willful disrespect of the rules, a strong and lasting message must be sent that such conduct is totally unacceptable and has no place in the game,” Goodell said. “Beyond the clear and continuing violations of league rules, and lying to investigators, the bounty program is squarely contrary to the league’s most important initiatives — enhancing player health and safety and protecting the integrity of the game,” the commissioner continued. “Let me be clear. There is no place in the NFL for deliberately seeking to injure another player, let alone offering a reward for doing so,” Goodell said.
PARIS, France — (DMN/BBC) – France’s interior minister has denied reports that security forces have arrested the main suspect in the recent spate of shootings around Toulouse. Claude Gueant said negotiations were continuing with the suspect, named as Mohammed Merah, 23, a Frenchman of Algerian origin. BFM TV earlier reported that Merah had been detained inside a block of flats that has been surrounded by police. He is suspected of killing three soldiers and four Jewish people.
The killings took place in and around Toulouse in three separate incidents earlier this month. On 11 March, a soldier was shot and killed after replying to an advertisement offering a motorcycle for sale. Days later, two soldiers were shot and killed and a third was wounded while waiting for money from a cash machine. And earlier this week, three children and an adult were shot and killed outside a Jewish school. President Nicolas Sarkozy is attending a memorial at a military base in nearby Montauban for the three murdered soldiers. He has been speaking to Jewish community leaders, and reportedly told them that the gunmen had been planning more attacks before police had surrounded his apartment block.
At the scene
Richard Galpin BBC News, Toulouse
Just after President Sarkozy arrived in Toulouse for meetings at a military barracks close to where the siege is taking place, reports began circulating that it was all over, Mohammed Merah had been arrested. But minutes later came the denials. First by local officials in Toulouse, then by the interior minister himself. It all added to the tension. How will the siege which began at 3am local time on Wednesday morning, be brought to an end?
Officially the French government says it wants to capture him alive so that he can stand trial on charges of murdering seven people and injuring at least two others. But it will not be an easy operation if he decides to stand and fight. He is reported to have an automatic rifle, a sub machinegun and grenades inside his apartment.
Police surrounded Merah’s block of flats after two officers were shot at when they tried to get into his flat. Officials say he is heavily armed with a Kalashnikov high-velocity rifle, a mini-Uzi 9mm machine pistol, several handguns and possibly grenades. The five-story block of flats was evacuated earlier, and police were also moving residents of nearby buildings. Elsewhere in the city, police are hunting for accomplices and have detained several members of his family. His mother was taken to the scene in the hope that she could persuade him to surrender, but she told police that she had no influence over her son.
Negotiators have been talking to Merah all morning, but Mr Gueant, who is at the scene, said he appeared to have no particular demands. The suspect has said he belonged to al-Qaeda and acted to “avenge Palestinian children”. He had apparently spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was jailed for three years for planting bombs. The prison director in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, Gulam Farooq, told the BBC that Merah was arrested in 2007, but escaped in a Taliban-led break-out in 2008.
3.20pm:Le Figaro’s live blog has more on Merah preparing this morning to kill again (see 2.50pm). It says he told investigators he had decided to kill a soldier in Toulouse and had already idenitified his target.
3.10pm: Sarkozy has just spoken at a service for the three soldiers shot dead last week. He said the gunman had attacked the French army, whose members, regardless of their colour or creed, protect the values and people of a single French republic.
The French soldier knows he can die so France’s values can survive, the French soldier knows the meaning of the words duty and sacrifice and knows how to look death in the face.
The death they faced was not the one they were expecting in the battlefield, they were executed by a terrorist.
Today we know the assassin was targeting soldiers. They were killed because they were French soldiers, they worked for the French army. It was the French army the terrorist was attacking
2.58pm:• Anti-terror police are continuing to surround a block of flats in Toulouse where the main suspect in the murders of three soldiers and four civilians is holed up
• The suspect, named as Mohammed Merah, is reported to have travelled to fight in Afghanistan and to have been jailed there before escaping in 2008
• The French government has confirmed that Merah had been under surveillance by the security services, but say he did nothing to suggest he was “preparing criminal activity”
• Despite giving up a handgun, Merah is understood still to possess at least two machine guns. Police say explosives have been found in his brother’s car
• Merah’s family has been taken into “precautionary custody”
• President Sarkozy has appealed for unity, saying: “We must give in neither to discrimination nor revenge”.
• The funerals of the four Jewish victims of the attacks have taken place in Jerusalem today and Sarkozy is attending a memorial service for the dead soldiers
2.50pm: The local representative of the Jewish umbrella group the Crif, Nicole Yardeni, said Nicolas Sarkozy had told her and Muslim leaders that Merah was readying himself to kill again this morning when police intervened.
Security Forces in Kandahar have never detained a French citizen named Mohammad Merah.”
Are they suggesting they have arrested someone of that name – but not of that nationality?
2.35pm: It seems that Sarkozy has had to leave the police station he was visiting in Toulouse to attend the service for the murdered soldiers in Montauban.
1.58pm: I think the headline on the BFMTV website sums things up rather well:
Toulouse: des informations contradictoires sur l’arrestation
1.56pm: Reuters now have Guéant denying the arrest, too. The lines of communication appear to be a little tangled at the scene.
1.54pm: Sarkozy has now arrived at a police station nearby where the people evacuated from the block are being looked after and from where the siege is being directed.
Sarkozy is no stranger to sieges: he personally negotiated the freeing of several children during a school siege in Neuilly in 1993, when 21 children were taken hostage. The hostage taker was eventually shot and killed by the police.
1.41pm: Police are now saying that explosives were found in Merah’s brother’s car.
1.40pm: Guéant, however, is apparently denying any arrest …
1.38pm: There’s some speculation that Sarkozy himself will announce Merah’s arrest as he’s getting very near the scene. The election is just weeks away.
1.36pm: Reuters notes both BFMTV and i-Tele are reporting that Merah has been arrested after a standoff lasting nearly 12 hours.
One police source who is not directly linked to the investigation confirmed the arrest to Reuters, but several other sources said they were not aware of it.
The TV channels cited police sources for the information, without providing further details. It was not immediately possible to confirm this.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is expected to speak to the nation this afternoon.
1.22pm: Breaking news: BFMTV are reporting that Merah has been arrested …
1.20pm:Angelique Chrisafis has been talking to people near the scene of the standoff in Toulouse. She has sent this dispatch:
On the streets near the apartment block under siege, several young men gathered who claimed they knew the suspect from Les Izards, a mixed neighbourhood of Toulouse where he had grown up. A 25-year-old French man, whose parents were born in Algeria, said: “I grew up with him. I’m totally shocked and surprised, I can’t believe that he could do this. His mum was French of Algerian origin — she brought him up alone. He didn’t have a dad. This has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, or with us, and I really hope that all the young people of our type of neighbourhood won’t be sullied by this. It has always been hard enough living in France with prejudice but now it’s going to be much worse.”
Another man who said he was 24 and a warehouse worker, but did not give his name, said he knew the family, in particular the suspect’s brother. He said: “I came down here because I wanted to see what was going on. I heard someone at work listening to the news say this morning, ‘It’s an Arab, It’s an Arab’ … He was the kind of kid who got into trouble, but he was a banal young guy. Over the past two years he had changed a lot. He wasn’t into having fun, he became harder. He didn’t really go to the mosque, he seemed more likely to meet people in obscure flats.”
Many said they didn’t know the suspect had moved to the Côte Pavée neighbourhood where the raid was taking place. The father of one resident in the block of flats said he had moved in at around the same time as his son about a year ago, and had helped him move a sofa but that he didn’t know him well.
One woman said: “I knew his family and his mother, his father had died. There was nothing to suggest he would have acted like this. The North African community is doubly hit, first by the grief for the victims and what happened, and also that we’re from the Magreb and people will be pointing fingers at us. I appeal to the French, don’t mix up the whole community with what has happened. Never never has Islam said to kill people.”
1.15pm: Merah has resumed talks with the police and appears very keen to try to explain himself.
His lawyer, meanwhile, says Merah was due to serve a month in prison for his driving offence, and was due up in court again in April.
1.13pm: A police official has told AP that officers will storm the flats unless Merah gives himself up as promised.
Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said the suspect has promised to turn himself into police by 2:30 pm (1330GMT).
Delage says if that doesn’t happen, police will force their way in to try to take him by force. Hundreds of riot police are surrounding the building
1.04pm: A little more on that Reuters line (below) on Merah trying to join the army: according to BFMTV, he applied to join the French Foreign Legion in 2010 …
1.01pm: Details of Merah’s apparently normal life are beginning to emerge as reporters descend on his friends and neighbours.
Cedric Lambert, 46, father of an upstairs neighbour, said Merah was friendly and had helped them about 10 months ago to carry a heavy sofa upstairs.
“He was extremely normal,” Lambert said.
A group of four 24-year-old men who said they were friends of Merah tried to go to his apartment block on Wednesday to persuade him to surrender but were stopped at a police roadblock.
All told a Reuters reporter he had never talked to them about religion and they had no idea he had been to Afghanistan.
One friend who gave his name as Kamal, a financial adviser at La Banque Postale, said he had known Merah at school and they had done soccer training together after meeting again two years ago. He said:
He is someone who is very discreet. He is not someone who would brag and go around and say ‘Oh look at my new girlfriend, look how great I am.’ He is very polite and always well-behaved.
“He never spoke about Islam but he did pray. But we all pray five times a day. There’s nothing strange about that.”
Another friend of Moroccan origin said Merah had tried to enlist in the French army but had been rejected. He said he had seen Merah in a city centre nightclub just last week.
Merah did not drink “but I don’t think he is any more religious than I am. I think he has just lost the plot,” Danny Dem said.
A third contemporary, who declined to give his name, said he went to primary school with Merah and they had remained friends.
“He likes football and motor-bikes like any other guy his age,” said the man, dressed in a blue French national soccer shirt. “I didn’t even know he prayed.”
12.58pm: Guéant says Merah has “explained a lot about his itinerary” to police negotiators, adding: “His radicalisation took place in a salafist ideological group and seems to have been firmed up by two journeys he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Reuters is also quoting a security source who says Afghan intelligence officials passed details of Merah’s identity to their French counterparts following his arrest in 2007.
Christian Dellacherie, the proprietor of Yamaha Yam31, told the paper:
The police were asking for precise details on the model of scooter used and the colour. It wasn’t until Tuesday morning after the murders at the Toulouse school that one particular fact popped back into our memories – a client who was repainting his scooter had asked an employee in the workshop how to deactivate the tracker. We’d had that information for about a week, but it was only when the colour of the scooter changed between [the] Montauban [attacks] and [the] Toulouse [attacks] that it became an important factor.”
12.33pm: Christian Etelin, a lawyer who represented Merah in court in Toulouse on 24 February for driving without a license, has told French BFMTV that Merah knew he was under surveillance since returning from Afghanistan, but was “extremely discreet about his political views”.
Etelin described Merah as “by no means rigid or fanatical”, and said he could never imagine him committing crimes of such “hardness and extremity … If you could say anything, it was that he was polite and courteous … quite sweet actually.”
He also said Merah’s mother — and his elder sister, to whom he was close — despaired of him somewhat.
He said Merah had been imprisoned at 18 for bag snatching in the entrance hall of a bank in 2005. Even so, he added, Merah was not someone who you could call violent.
Unlike a lot of others who grew up alongside him in that area in the north of the city, he was not involved in drugs. His thing was petty theft … As for political or religious beliefs, he was very discreet. He never said anything that might lead one to believe he had these views.”
The lawyer said he was ready to try to talk to him but added that he feared the situation would end with Merah’s death — either by his own hand of at those of the police.
12.22pm: Emma Graham-Harrison has more on the Afghan angle:
Jawed Faisal, a spokesman for the Kandahar provincial governor, said:
I can’t confirm it was the same person but there was someone in Kandahar prison with the name Mohammed Merah, who was famous as ‘the French guy’. His father and grandfather had Afghan names, and he could pass as an Afghan. His father’s name was Mohammad Seddiq, grandfather was Mohammad Shah.
“His crime was that he was captured laying IEDs, and he was sentenced to three years in jail, but only served five months of it when the prison break happened and he escaped.
“We don’t know which part of Kandahar province he was caught in.”
Faisal added that he didn’t know how long Merah had been in Afghanistan or how long he stayed after prison break.
Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the Nato-led coalition, said he was aware of reports that Merah had been held in an Afghan prison, but refered all questions to Afghan officials.
Time for a quick recap of what’s happened in Toulouse and elsewhere today:
• Counter-terror police have surrounded a block of flats in Toulouse where the main suspect in the murders of three soldiers and four civilians is holed up
• The suspect, named as Mohammed Merah, is reported to have travelled to fight in Afghanistan and to have been jailed there before escaping in 2008
• The French government has confirmed Merah had been under surveillance by the security services
• Despite giving up a handgun, Merah is understood still to possess at least two machine guns
• Merah’s family has been taken into “precautionary custody”
• President Sarkozy has appealed for unity, saying: “We must give in neither to discrimination nor revenge”.
• The funerals of the four Jewish victims of the attacks has taken place in Jerusalem today.
Up to 1,000 prisoners, including 400 Taliban militants, were on the run in Kandahar last night after a dramatic Taliban assault on the southern Afghan city’s main prison.
The militants blew the prison gates open with a massive truck bomb and flooded inside, attacking the guards and freeing the inmates. A jubilant Taliban spokesman said the group had deployed 30 motorcycle mounted attackers and two suicide bombers.
11.45am: Claude Guéant, the French interior minister, says it seems that Merah was a petty criminal who was radicalised by an extremist group in Toulouse before travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But, Le Monde reports, Guéant is insistent that during the time Merah was monitored by the French security services, “nothing ever arose to suggest that he was preparing criminal activity”.
11.30am: Reuters are firming up the picture on Merah’s apparent time in Afghanistan. According to the Kandahar prison director, Merah was detained by security services on 19 December 2007 and was sentenced to three years in jail for planting bombs in Kandahar province, the Taliban’s birthplace.
Le Monde’s reports would seem to suggest that Merah visited Pakistan and Afghanistan — where he was picked up by Afghan police — despite having already been detained and imprisoned in the latter country …
11.19am: Details of the suspect’s time in Afghanistan are still sketchy, but Le Monde is reporting that he went twice to Pakistan, once in 2010 and again 2011, to speak with groups of fighters based in the tribal regions near the border with Afghanistan. The paper claims that he trained in the camps there alongside the Pakistani Taliban, foreign jihadis and members of the Haqqani network — and that he even crossed the border into Afghanistan as part of groups sent to fight Nato troops.
It says he is understood to have stopped off in Waziristan before heading to Kandahar and Zabul in the south of Afghanistan. Interestingly, it also says that he was stopped by police on the outskirts of Kandahar city. Although he was not arrested, his presence in the region as a foreign national was unusual enough for the police to report him to the Afghan intelligence services, who reportedly then passed on the information to western intelligence services.
It’s unclear how Le Monde’s claims tally with those of the director of Kandahar prison.
11.16am: According to the Kandahar prison director, the suspect escaped in 2008 during an insurgent attack on the jail.
11.09am: The director of Kandahar prison in Afghanistan has identified the suspect as Mohammed Merah — a name that has also been given to AFP by a source close to the Toulouse investigation.
The prison director, Ghulam Faruq, has told Reuters that the man was arrested for planting bombs in Kandahar and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment before he escaped during a mass Taliban jailbreak.
If this turns out to be true, the French governement and security services — who are understood to have been following the suspect for years — are going to face some very tough questions.
10.52am: Here’s some quotes from Sarkozy’s address the Elysee presidential palace, via Reuters:
We must be united. We must give in neither to discrimination nor revenge. I have brought together the Jewish and Muslim communities to show that terrorism will not manage to break our nation’s feeling of community.”
10.49am: The police must find out whether the suspect acted “alone, or in a small or larger group”, according to Guéant, who is quoted by Le Monde. The interior minister says that the suspect’s mother, two brothers and two sisters have been taken in by the police. One of the brothers, he says, “is also engaged in salafist ideology”. The other members of the family have been taken into “precuationary custody”. The mother is understood to have chosen not to try to get through to her son because she feared “he would remain deaf to her appeals”.
10.38am: Angelique reports that the father of a man living in the block where the suspect is holed up has confirmed that his son and the residents of the other flats have been evacuated and taken to local police station
10.29am: Sarkozy has paid tribute to the “exceptional work” of the police and said he has been “profoundly moved” by recent events. He has also announced he will visit Toulouse before after attending this afternoon’s memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in Montauban.
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has signed into law a bill which lays out when citizens might be justified in using force against police officers. I applaud this bill because it gives people the right to defend their homes against illegal entry by police. It does not, in any way, apply to people who are doing something illegal inside their homes. With the nationwide trend in home invasions by perpetrators pretending to be police officers the law is a good idea. It will also, hopefully, cause law enforcement agencies make sure that they are legally justified in kicking down a door and it’s the right door in the first place.
The bill that was a response to a public uproar over a state Supreme Court ruling last year that residents couldn’t resist officers even during an illegal entry. Supporters say the proposal strengthens the legal rights of people against government agents improperly entering their homes. But police groups worry about the measure giving people justification for attacking officers. Daniels says in a statement he concluded the bill narrowed the legal conditions under which anyone could use force against police. The reality is that the world we live in is dangerous enough. Anyone predisposed to attack a police officer is, unfortunately, going to do it anyway regardless of whether this law is on the books or not but people should be safe in their homes.
WALLER, Texas — (DMN) – Police have arrested a man who is a suspect in the death of his mother, father and brother who were found Tuesday inside a house in Waller, Texas, 40 miles northwest of Houston. The bodies of the couple and their son were found fatally shot around 1 p.m. in the 2400 block of Farr. “It’s a horrific scene. A family was murdered here,” said Waller Police Chief Phil Rehak. A warrant was issued for the couple’s older son, 22-year-old Trey Sesler, according to Rehak. Texas Rangers took Sesler into custody at a house located in the 26000 block of Barnett near Magnolia Tuesday evening. His car had been seen there and they had been watching the house for several hours. Sesler was taken to the Montgomery County Jail.
Police went to the house after concerned relatives called and asked them to check on the family. “We found that there was a lot of damage done to the residence. I could see, actually, a person lying on the floor through a window,” said Rehak. “We later discovered three bodies in the residence.” Rehak said he’s not aware of any prior problems with Sesler and didn’t comment on a possible motive. In videos posted online Sesler is not shy about showing off his guns. “I got an equalizer!” he said in one post while holding up an assault-style rifle.
He fancies himself a film maker and video game reviewer calling himself “Mr. Enemy.” Police call him a killer and said he used a gun to kill his entire family sometime Tuesday morning inside their Waller home. Weda Frierson, a family member, said she was in shock. “I saw the police tape and I knew something serious was going on, and I ran out of the front door,” she said. The victim’s are her nephew, his wife and her grand nephew, and the man accused of killing them is her grand nephew. “I have to admit he was quite strange,” Frierson said of Trey Sesler.
Family members said he was under some kind of medical treatment, but said nothing could explain the killings. “He would never do anything to his mother. He was crazy about his mother. We found out differently,” Frierson said. Before Sesler’s arrest, police said they were worried about what he might do next and, because of the videos, thought that Sesler was armed and dangerous, potentially even with body armor. “We don’t know if this is part of a plan to carry something else out, or if this is just a random act that he did because of something that occurred here,” Rehak said.
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Sesler was arrested Tuesday night, just hours after police found the bodies of his parents – Lawton Ray and Rhonda Wyse Sesler – and his brother, 26-year-old Mark Alan Sesler, at their home in Waller. Police are not sure exactly when the victims were shot, but said it could have been as early as Monday afternoon. Police were called to the home by concerned family members around 1 p.m. Tuesday. Investigators described the gruesome scene as a “war zone.” “The best way for me to describe the residence is it looked like a war zone – a tremendous amount of damage inside the residence, the crime scene was not contained to one area of the residence. It was from one end of the residence to the other, front to back, which is unusual,” Waller Police Chief Phil Rehak said.
Richard Galpin BBC News, Toulouse
On the streets near the apartment block under siege, several young men gathered who claimed they knew the suspect from Les Izards, a mixed neighbourhood of Toulouse where he had grown up. A 25-year-old French man, whose parents were born in Algeria, said: “I grew up with him. I’m totally shocked and surprised, I can’t believe that he could do this. His mum was French of Algerian origin — she brought him up alone. He didn’t have a dad. This has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, or with us, and I really hope that all the young people of our type of neighbourhood won’t be sullied by this. It has always been hard enough living in France with prejudice but now it’s going to be much worse.”
