[10] On 19 March, he opened fire at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse, killing a rabbi and three children, and also wounding four others.

[11][12] After the shootings, France raised its terror alert system, Vigipirate, to the highest level in the Midi-Pyrénées region and surrounding departements.

[17][18][19] His brother and another man were later convicted of taking part in a "terrorist conspiracy" over the attacks, which were condemned by the French Council of the Muslim Faith,[20] the United Nations[21] and many governments around the world.

[32] The police investigation found that Merah had made more than 1,800 calls to over 180 contacts in 20 different countries, in addition to having taken several trips to the Middle East and Afghanistan, and they suggested he might have been in touch with others about his planned attacks.

[35] On 11 March, Master Sergeant Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a 30-year-old off-duty French Moroccan paratrooper in the 1st Parachute Logistics Regiment (1er Régiment du train parachutiste), was killed by a point-blank shot in the head in front of a middle school in Southeast Toulouse.

[37] On Thursday, 15 March, at around 14:00, two uniformed soldiers, 25-year-old Corporal Abdel Chennouf and 23-year-old Private Mohamed Legouad,[38] were shot and killed and a third, 27-year-old Loïc Liber,[39] was seriously injured by shooting (and left tetraplegic) as the three were withdrawing money from a cash machine outside a shopping centre in Montauban, around 50 km north of Toulouse.

It educates children of primarily Sephardic, Middle Eastern and North African descent, who with their parents have made up the majority of Jewish immigrants to France since the late 20th century.

The government increased security and raised the terrorist warnings to the highest level in the Midi-Pyrenees region in the immediate aftermath of the Toulouse school shooting.

[49] On 23 March, Ange Mancini, intelligence adviser to President Sarkozy, said Merah had wanted to kill another soldier in Toulouse, but arrived too late and instead attacked the nearby Jewish school.

The search for Sergeant Ibn Ziaten's bogus motorbike buyer began to hone in on Merah's computer, as cross-checks revealed that the Toulouse woman who owned the IP address had two sons on the government's anti-terrorism watchlist.

"[16] At 03:00 local time (02:00 UTC), the French police tried to arrest Merah at his apartment on Sergent Vigné Street in the Côte Pavée neighborhood of Toulouse.

A team of 15 specially trained counter terrorism operators decided to enter the flat first by the door, then using the windows, whose shutters had been removed during the night.

[23] Dan Bilefsky linked Merah's anger to the high unemployment and alienation of young immigrants in France, and said this affected his development as a self-styled jihadist.

DiManno characterized Merah as a sociopath who "sought posthumous grandeur" and adopted a terror agenda as a cover for his pre-existing rage.

[85] Journalist Paul Sheehan attacked what he called progressives going into overdrive to "dissociate the violence from Islam" when it was revealed the killer was a Muslim who supported al-Qaeda.

He observed that Merah had dubbed his film of the shootings with verses from the Koran invoking jihad and the greatness of Islam before he mailed it to Al-Jazeera.

[86] President Sarkozy's intelligence adviser stated that Merah did not originally target the Jewish school, but attacked it only after arriving too late to ambush a soldier nearby.

"[89] Bernard Squarcini, the head of DRCI (France's domestic intelligence agency), stated, "you have to go back to his broken childhood and psychiatric troubles.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "It is unthinkable to compare a massacre and the Israeli army's surgical, defensive actions against those who use children as human shields."

Lady Ashton said that the press reporting of her speech was "grossly distorted" and that had she also referred to Israeli victims in Sderot, but this had been incorrectly omitted from the original transcript.

French counter-terrorism expert Christian Prouteau criticised the siege operation, saying tear gas might have been used to capture Merah alive and reduce the chance he could attack police.

A group of twenty youths accosted the police, and Mohamed Redha Ghezali, a 20-year-old man from the neighbourhood, was sentenced to three months in prison for praising Merah's actions.

He was convicted of "provoking racial hatred" and "apology for terrorism," and the Toulouse prosecutor stated that France would "systematically pursue" people expressing support for Merah.

A movement is under way to mount a demonstration in support of the imprisoned Abdelkader Merah, who faces charges of complicity in murder and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism.

The New York Times quoted Pierre Cohen, the mayor of Toulouse, stating that rumours of Muslims organizing a demonstration for Merah were "false".

[130] On 26 March, a 12-year-old boy was hit and punched in the back of his head as he left his Ozar Hatorah school in Paris "by youths reciting anti-Semitic slogans".

[140][141] In discussing alienation and Les Izards, Nicholas Vinocur writes, "The fear is, there may be more Mohamed Merahs in waiting among Europe's largest Muslim community, of some five million people in France – a worry that may partly explain Friday's roundup of 19 suspected militant Islamists as Sarkozy's government asserts a firm grip on security.

"[142] Sarkozy requested that the police increase its surveillance of "radical Islam" amid rising concerns of a jihadist threat in France.

[140] There were suggestions that the government and DCRI were intensifying efforts to deal with suspected militants after being criticised for allowing Merah to slip through the net.

[needs update] French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said that the two deported were a Malian imam who had preached anti-Semitism and promoted wearing the burka, and Ali Belhadad, an Algerian with involvement in a 1994 Marrakech attack.