Ten years after the Mohamed Merah attacks which killed seven people, including Jewish children, Emmanuel Macron and Israeli President Isaac Herzog paid tribute, on Sunday March 20 in Toulouse, to the victims of “barbarism”.
On March 19, 2012, at the Jewish school Otzar Hatorah, renamed Ohr Torah, two children, Myriam Monsonego, 7, and Gabriel Sandler, 3, were shot dead at close range in the playground by Mohammed Merah, a delinquent. 23-year-old radicalized. A few seconds earlier, Arié Sandler, 6, and his father Jonathan Sandler had also succumbed to the bullets of the scooter killer.
He had started his murderous journey a week earlier to shoot down, in Toulouse then Montauban, three soldiers, Imad Ziaten, Abel Chennouf and Mohamed Legouad, and cause irreversible injuries to a fourth soldier, Loïc Liber, who had become a quadriplegic.
Before the speech of the two presidents, Samuel Sandler, father and grandfather of Jonathan, Gabriel and Arie, killed in March 2012, spoke in front of some 200 people. “Since this carnage, I live under anesthesia, like a ghost. Their absence haunts me”he said in front of an upset audience, believing that “the war” against his own, the Jews, “never stopped”.
denouncing “diabolical raids”paying tribute to the victims one by one, Emmanuel Macron recalled that “that day, for the first time in France, a school was the battlefield of Islamist fundamentalism”. Beyond “innocent lives snuffed out”it’s a “whole country that was struck to the heart by destructive madness and betrayed religion”he said.
Those “pure and innocent children”killed by “a vile assassin, full of burning hatred”, “God will avenge them”, underlined for his part the Israeli president. But, added Emmanuel Macron, “we are stronger than the terrorists, we are holding on, we have not lowered our heads, we have not lowered our arms” in front of “this challenge of our generations to which we will not yield”.