A 32-hour standoff between French police and the main suspect in the killings of 7 in the south of France came to an end on Thursday when police raided the apartment of suspected shooter Mohammed Merah.
On Wednesday, French television channel France 2 released a video purporting to show some of the first footage of the suspected shooter.
The video from 2012 allegedly shows then-21-year-old Mohamed Merah spinning a stolen car on the outskirts of Toulouse. "A smiling young man, who seemed to feel comfortable in his own skin," the voiceover narrates.
According to the Associated Press, 23-year-old Merah was killed when he burst out of his bathroom shooting as police entered the apartment. Merah continued to fire "until he was hit by a retaliatory shot from the RAID (elite police unit), which felled him with a bullet to the head," prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Merah, a French citizen of Algerian decent, told police during negotiations that he was responsible for the killings of 7 French civilians -- 3 Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi, and 3 paratroopers. The AP reports that Merah "espoused a radical form of Islam and had been to Afghanistan and the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan, where he claimed to have received training from al-Qaida."
Watch the footage from France 2 above.