A French teenager who massacred 13 people in a weekend rampage in a southern town and then killed himself was apparently a neo-Nazi fanatic, police said on Monday.
Police said 16-year-old Eric Borel, whose killing spree has shocked France, had pictures of German World War II leader Adolf Hitler and neo-Nazi literature in his bedroom. Borel often wore black.He bludgeoned three members of his family to death on Saturday and the next day stalked through Cuers, killing at random with a 22-caliber rifle before turning the gun on himself.
Nine people died of gunshot wounds immediately, and a 59-year-old man shot by Borel died on Monday. One boy was fighting for his life and six others were injured.
"The carnage of the crazy teenager," cried the headline of the popular daily France-Soir, which carried a front-page color picture of a victim covered with a blood-soaked sheet.
"This angel of death's slow walk through a sleepy village gives the killings a potency of horror that no thriller writer has yet come up with," it said in an editorial.
The day before his rampage, Borel had battered his stepfather, mother and 11-year-old half-brother to death with a hammer and a baseball bat in the nearby village of Sollies-Pont.
In Cuers, north of the Mediterranean port town of Toulon, he fired at passers-by. Witnesses said he had calmly reloaded his rifle between shots and, at one stage, turned around to finish off a man he had wounded in the leg.
Neighbours in Sollies-Pont, where Borel and his family lived, described him as a quiet and inhibited boy who appeared to have no friends and who never acknowledged people when they greeted him.