Citizens, elected officials, soldiers, representatives of the Jewish community commemorated during a ceremony, Saturday in Toulouse, the attacks of March 2012 which killed three paratroopers, three Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher.
“Do not forget, above all do not forget this barbarity, we have a duty to remember”, testifies Anne-Marie Guyot, 58, who campaigns for the Iman association, founded by the mother of Imad Ibn Ziaten, the first soldier killed by Mohamed Merah on March 11, 2012.
In front of a commemorative plaque near the town hall of Toulouse, she laid 8 roses, one for each death and an 8th intended for Loïc Liber, the soldier who survived, quadriplegic, the massacre of March 15 in front of the barracks of the 17th RGP of Montauban, where Mohamed Legouad and Abel Chennouf fell under the bullets of the scooter killer.
“We must also think of those who are bruised in their flesh,” she said in a voice of emotion.
On Sunday, a large commemoration in a concert hall in Toulouse will bring together 2,000 guests, including French Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Israeli Isaac Herzog, former heads of state François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, representatives of the Muslim faith and hundreds of personalities from Civil society.
On March 19, 10 years to the day after the shooting at the Jewish school Ozar Hatorah, Toulouse residents remember the faces of Gabriel and Arié Sandler, two brothers aged 3 and 6, and Myriam Monsonego, 8, shot dead before entering class.
“It’s a wound that does not close and reopens with each commemoration”, testifies Salomon Attia, 44, a former student of the school and today part of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) .
Pierre Lasry, former head of the parents’ association, remembers “things that I hope never to see again in my life”, “10 years later, we all have the slightest second engraved in us, we have consequences, for young people of 10, 15, 18 years old, imagine what it can leave as consequences…”.
“It is particularly atrocious, as much for the soldiers killed at close range as for the (Jewish) community. This commemoration allows us to feel that this city, bruised, mourns with us”.
Ten years have passed since the seven crimes of Mohamed Merah, numerous attacks have followed elsewhere in France, and the Islamist threat has not disappeared, underlines the mayor of Toulouse Jean-Luc Moudenc.
He wants the commemorations to be an opportunity to “morally rearm society through a republican leap”. “It would be a mistake to believe that Islamism has stopped, it continues to act quietly,” he warns.