Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people including three children, sent a video of the killings to the television station al-Jazeera, it has emerged.
The Paris office of the Qatar-based broadcasters confirmed they received a letter containing a USB memory stick and a letter claiming responsibility for the murders. The memory stick was found to contain 25 minutes of video recordings of his nine-day killing spree, interspersed with what police said were "war chants".
The film was authenticated by investigators. The postal stamp on the parcel was dated last Wednesday. At the time, Merah, who expressed support for al-Qaeda, was already holed up in his flat in the south eastern city of Toulouse surrounded by police, who had swooped at 3am.
He was finally killed in a shoot-out with police on Thursday morning after a 32-hour siege.
Merah killed a rabbi teacher and three children, all under the age of ten, at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday 19 March. In two previous shootings he gunned down three French paratroopers, two of them Muslims, and was said to be planning further killings when he was identified and his home besieged by an elite RAID police unit.
According to police sources quoted in Le Figaro, the letter was sent from a village close to Toulouse. Detectives are now trying to establish whether Merah posted the video before returning to his flat on Tuesday, or whether he had an accomplice.
