Toulouse: The man without a face, dark visor down on his motorcycle helmet, strides after a child into her schoolyard, grabs her by the hair and calmly shoots her in the head.
Cold-blooded killing gets no more glacial than the murder of eight-year-old Myriam Monsonego by a serial gunman who one witness described as wearing a camera to film his victims and was called by his pursuers "meticulous", "calculating" and "well prepared".
And yet by the time he parked his maxi-scooter outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday, Mohammad Merah, who police besieging his apartment say confessed on Wednesday to seven killings in the name of Al Qaida, had made two basic blunders that had put detectives close on his heels.
Watchlist
The 24-year-old, already on the watchlist of France's DCRI homeland security agency after his return last year from trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan, took care to wipe fingerprints and DNA from cartridges found at the scene of the second of the three attacks he is alleged to have conducted in eight days.
But from the moment he used his mother's computer to lure into a trap his first victim, a French soldier who like himself was of North African heritage, Merah had handed police a vital clue that would lead them to him. They were not in time, however, to save the lives of another two soldiers, three Jewish children and rabbi — a delay now facing scrutiny in France.
When Merah responded to an advert Staff Sergeant Emad Bin Ziaten had placed on the online classified site www.boncoin.fr, and arranged to meet him on Sunday, March 11, at a quiet spot in Toulouse, the unique serial number, or IP address, of a computer at his mother's home was recorded.
Clues
But he was just one of 575 people interested in the motorcycle offered by the online seller "Emad", who revealed in the ad that he was a soldier.
There were few other clues to go on when Sergeant Bin Ziaten was shot in the head, point-blank, while discussing the sale on a patch of grass near a gymnasium in Toulouse by a man who fled into the afternoon on a high-powered scooter. But cybercops were left trying to narrow down hundreds of electronic leads, until further killings would let them zero in on a prime suspect.
