French attack: Bodies flown to Israel

The plane also flew French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe to Tel Aviv along with 50 relatives and friends of the victims who were shot dead in a cold-blooded attack at a Toulouse school on Monday and will be buried in Israel.

The Israeli flag-carrier plane was expected to land in Tel Aviv at 05:35, an airport source said, confirming that it had taken off from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport shortly after midnight.

Jonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old Frenchman, his two sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4 as well as 7-year-old Myriam Monsonego will be buried later on Wednesday morning at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem, according to the Israeli embassy in France.

President Nicolas Sarkozy paid silent homage to the victims on Tuesday at a school in Paris close to the city’s Holocaust memorial, and afterwards admitted that authorities had as yet no clue as to the identity of the killer.

“Anti-Semitism is obvious. The Jewish school attack was an anti-Semitic crime,” Sarkozy told reporters at the Paris school after meeting children.

French investigators fear the same gunman also killed three soldiers in two recent separate attacks and may strike again.

The soldiers were French citizens of North African origin, while another who was critically wounded in the attack was black and from the French West Indies.

The bodies of the four victims of the Toulouse rampage were first flown to Paris from southern France with their families on Tuesday.

Sarkozy and Prime Minister Francois Fillon paid their respects to the bodies as they lay in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.

The region around Toulouse was placed on maximum alert amid fears that the gunman will strike again.- AFP