Al Jazeera confirmed on Tuesday that its Paris office received from an anonymous source video footage that appears to show last week's shooting spree in Toulouse, France—and said the network would not televise it.
"The Al Jazeera Paris received a video from an anonymous source yesterday entitled 'Al Qaeda attaque la France' that appears to show the recent killings in Toulouse and Montauban," a spokesman for the network said in a statement to Yahoo News. "Given its contents, we immediately passed the video on to the French police as we were duty bound to do and they are conducting their investigation."
The video, he added, "does not add any information that is not already in the public domain, its news channels will not be broadcasting any of its contents."
French president Nicholas Sarkozy and other officials had pleaded with media to not air the footage, according to the BBC. The footage was sent to Al Jazeera on a USB drive with a letter claiming the attacks were inspired by al-Qaida.
The network said it had received numerous requests from media outlets for copies of the video, but that "all such requests are being declined."
The suspected gunman, Mohamed Merah, was killed Thursday in a dramatic shootout that ended a 32-hour standoff. Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had admitted to negotiators that he had killed three children and their teacher and three French paratroopers. Authorities said they found videotapes he had made of the killings in his apartment.
Al Jazeera has not confirmed that the videos it received were made by Merah, though the footage was reportedly shot from "the killer's point of view."
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