Toulouse - UPI
French police raided a house in Toulouse Wednesday morning, trying to coax a 24-year-old suspect in a deadly Jewish school shooting into giving himself up. Shots fired from inside the house -- in the Cote Pavee neighborhood, about 2 miles south of the Jewish school where the four people were killed Monday -- left two officers wounded, police said. The raid by elite special operations police began around 3:30 a.m. (10:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday), police said. The unidentified suspect -- who French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said was a French national of Algerian origin who spent considerable time in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- was barricaded, talking to police from behind a door of the house, Gueant said. He spoke numerous times \"of his al-Qaida links,\" Gueant told reporters. CNN quoted officials as saying the suspect belonged to a jihadist group called Forsane Alizza, or Knights of Glory. The French government banned the group in January for trying to recruit people to fight in Afghanistan. Police tried to get the suspect\'s mother to talk to him but she refused, saying she had very little contact with him, Gueant told reporters. Police arrested the suspect\'s brother, who had been inside the house, officials said. The suspect told police negotiators the killing of three Jewish school pupils and a teacher, and the shooting deaths of three French soldiers in recent days, were meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French involvement in the Afghanistan war, Gueant said. The three French children and the teacher killed Monday were to be buried in Jerusalem Wednesday, with French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe taking part in the funeral. The children, ages 3, 6 and 8, had joint French-Israeli nationality. The teacher, 30, was French but had a right to permanent Israeli residency. Juppe was in Jerusalem to represent the French government at the funerals and to express the French people\'s solidarity with the victims\' families and the Jewish community, the French foreign ministry said. He was expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres after the services. On Tuesday, the European Union\'s top diplomat, Catherine Ashton, denied she associated the French shooting with Israeli Gaza attacks that kill Palestinian children and said her remarks Monday were distorted. Ashton\'s staff Tuesday corrected the official transcript of a speech the European Union foreign policy chief made to a group of Palestinian children in Brussels Monday -- the day of the French killings. The revision shows that in addition to citing Gaza among her list of sites where children have been killed, she also mentioned an Israeli town near the Gaza Strip that has been the target of rocket attacks fired by Palestinian militias, the Financial Times reported. EU officials removed a video of Ashton\'s speech from an EU Web site, but people who watched it said Ashton had referred to \"what is happening in Gaza and Sderot,\" a nearly daily target of Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks for more than 10 years, the Times said. The original text of Ashton\'s remarks indicated she said, \"When we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and different parts of the world -- we remember young people and children who lose their lives.\" The corrected version said: \"When we remember what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened when I was in Norway last week a year ago, when we know what\'s happening in Syria, when we see what\'s happened in Gaza and Sredot. In different parts of the world, we remember young people and children who lose their lives.\" Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak condemned her remarks, even as corrected. \"The comparison made by Ashton between what is happening in Gaza to what happened in Toulouse, and what is going on in Syria every day, is outrageous and has absolutely no grounding in reality,\" he said. Netanyahu said he was \"especially upset about the comparison between the intentional slaughter of children and the [Israeli army\'s] surgical defensive strikes meant to hit terrorists who use children as a shield.\" \"There\'s no comparison between the two,\" he said. Ashton told a European Parliament committee in Brussels Tuesday she was \"really saddened of the distortion of my remarks.\" \"I condemn unreservedly the terrible murders\" in Toulouse, she said. \"I extend my sympathies to the families and friends of the victims, to the people of France and to the Jewish community,\" she said, adding that at Monday\'s refugee conference \"I drew no parallel whatsoever between this tragedy and events elsewhere in the Middle East.\"