Richard Durn, "the mad killer of Nanterre", took his life yesterday, 35 hours after he shot dead eight city councillors and seriously wounded 14 others in a town hall east of Paris.
Durn (33) jumped out of a fourth-floor window at 36 Quai des Orfévres, the Paris police headquarters made famous by the Simenon detective novels.
Durn had screamed "kill me, kill me" when he was overwhelmed during the Wednesday morning massacre.
He expressed his desire to die to police, and in three letters written before the shootings. The competence of French authorities is being questioned for repeatedly issuing gun permits to a man under psychiatric care, for allowing Durn to keep weapons for 15 months after those permits expired, and for placing the suicidal killer unhandcuffed in a roof-top office with an unprotected window.
After Durn threatened his psychiatrist with a gun in July 1998, she reported the incident to the police psychiatric service.
However the warning was lost in bureaucracy between Paris and the Nanterre prefecture, which renewed his gun permit in 1999. The Interior Minister, Mr Daniel Vaillant, announced a joint investigation by his own and the justice ministry into Durn's death. He said: "If errors were made, they will be punished."
Police could not explain why Durn was not restrained, and why he was not taken to an office with bars on the windows, of which there are many on the Quai des Orfévres.
When an officer asked him to walk over to a table to look at documents, Durn opened the skylight, hoisted himself through it and threw himself into the void, falling to a courtyard.
Hours after the eight councillors were murdered, President Jacques Chirac linked the killings to rising crime in France, which he has made his main campaign issue.
"Insecurity ranges from ordinary incivility to the tragedy that happened overnight," said Mr Chirac.
The right-wing Le Figaro and right-wing politicians supported him. However, the left-wing press and Green and socialist politicians accused Mr Chirac of exploiting the tragedy for political advantage.
Durn had outlined his plans in letters to acquaintances in Amiens and Rouen, and left a 13-page letter in the house he shared with his mother, an immigrant cleaning woman from Slovenia.
"I am mad. I have become a tramp, so I must die," one of the letters said. It repeated his desire to "kill people" and to "go out like a firework".He was bitter towards politicians in Nanterre who let him volunteer to put up posters but denied him friendship, recognition, employment and lodging.
Speaking to journalists through the slot of her letterbox, Ms Stefanina Durn (65) said her son had been inactive for three years. "He said, 'If I don't have a job, what will happen to me'?"
Durn has university degrees in history and political science, but never found meaningful employment. A magistrate said Durn talked about his crime "in a very calm way, with a vocabulary that showed a high level of culture".
