FRANCE: The communist mayor of Nanterre, Ms Jacqueline Fraysse, had just adjourned the town council meeting at 1.15 .am. yesterday.
Mr Durn sat through more than six hours of meetings at the town hall east of Paris before he shot eight municipal councillors dead and wounded 30 other people, 14 of them seriously. In the course of the evening, the jobless 33 year-old spoke to several of the men and women he was about to murder. According to eyewitnesses, he joked with some of them.
Then Mr Durn walked down steps towards the councillors' row, aiming at each victim's chest or stomach. "At first, the mayor and the others thought it was blanks or fireworks," the councillor Ms Emmanuelle Bobin told French television. "We realised he was firing real bullets when people started falling over and passing blood." The killer stopped once to change an ammunition cartridge. Almost all of the 40 bullets he fired hit their targets. He was overpowered as he tried to climb on to the stage, still shooting. Eyewitnesses were struck by Mr Durn's calm, methodical manner. Only when he was pinned to the ground did he begin shouting: "Kill me. Kill me."
By the time it was over, four communist councillors, three right-wing officials and a representative from the Green Party lay dead in the meeting hall. They included a deputy mayor who worked in a centre for the handicapped, a lawyer, two teachers, an engineer and an accountant. Dozens of ambulances, fire engines, police cars and a helicopter rushed to the scene of the killings.
A gun enthusiast of Yugoslav origin, Durn had joined a shooting club at nearby La Garenne-Colombes in 1996. Membership in the club enabled him to purchase the three guns legally in 1997 and 1998.
France's strict gun-control regulations - which require a medical examination and a police investigation - are supposed to prevent men like Richard Durn obtaining weapons. Four years ago, Durn threatened a psychiatrist in Paris with a firearm.
He has been under psychiatric care since 1990, and took the anti-depressant drug Prozac following two suicide attempts. He told his mother, with whom he lived in a small brick house, that he wanted to die, but not anonymously.
President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin visited the scene of the killings.
Both called the massacre "an act of murderous folly". The Green Party denied early reports that Durn was a member, though he served as an assessor for the Greens during last year's municipal elections. "All I can say is that he belonged to the left-wing tendency," the Green councillor, Mr Christian Demercastel, told Le Monde. "He said he wasn't really an ecologist, but that he was against American imperialism." Mr Jospin warned against confusing "this insane act" with the debate on insecurity and violence in France. "It will always be difficult to counter an act of madness."
Mr Durn's love of firearms seems to contradict his involvement in left-wing causes. He had done volunteer humanitarian work in Kosovo, and became the treasurer of the local human rights league this year. Neighbours said he was quiet. He studied history and political science, but never managed to find regular employment. At the College André Doucet, where he worked briefly as a monitor, students described him as sensitive, with eye-glasses and a fine-featured face. They called him "Mister Bean".
