Police were in a stand-off with the suspect in a Toulouse house A man suspected of killing seven people in southern France over the past three days, including three Jewish children, has not been arrested said French officials after a Reuters report ?

said otherwise.
Press agencies quoted an official as saying that Mohammed Merah (24) was captured by French police after a tense stand-off in a Tolouse house.
It appears the confrontation is ongoing.
The gunman on Wednesday allegedly targeted another soldier and two policemen until the police found him.
Police also said they found the camera which was used to film the gunman's attacks.
According to the French prosecutor, Francois Molins, Mohammed Merah says he was trained by al-Qaeda in Waziristan and visited Afghanistan twice, but, he also adds, Merah seems "atypical" and "cannot be attached to a structured organisation".
Merah is allegedly a person of "extreme violence", who could remain alone for prolonged periods of time.
Before the shootings in Toulouse and Montauban, Merah was known to the French authorities because he had a criminal record for non-terrorist crimes.
The Algerian-born French national allegedly trained with Pakistani Taliban militants before going to Afghanistan to fight with the insurgents, French newspaper Le Monde cited unnamed sources as saying.
According to Reuters news agency, the head of Kandahar prison in Afghanistan said Merah escaped from the prison in a mass Taliban jailbreak in 2008.
The suspect was allegedly serving a three year sentence for being involved in a bomb plot when he escaped from jail, quoting the director of Kandahar prison. 
French media have said Merah's neighbours in Toulouse were evacuated, and that a number of weapons were found in a car parked near the surrounded apartment.
President Nicolas Sarkozy in a speech congratulated the police services for their speedy investigation. Sarkozy said he had spoken with representatives of France's Muslim and Jewish communities. He said he told them "terrorism can not break our community".
The French president said "we should be united and not give in to vengeance. We owe this to the victims who have been killed in cold blood".
Police surrounded him at a house in Toulouse, after the shootings, in which three French soldiers and a rabbi and three Jewish children were killed.
According to the French authorities, he said he had sought to avenge Palestinian children and to attack the French army because of its foreign interventions.
 Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad also condemned the attack on the Jewish school: "It is time for these criminals to stop marketing their terrorist acts in the name of Palestine and to stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life".
The man, believed to be the gunman on a scooter who killed seven people in south-western France, described himself as an Islamist warrior and member of the al-Qaeda network.
French news channel BFM TV said he was linked to Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride), an Islamist group banned last month in France.
French police say he was previously arrested in the Afghan city of Kandahar, the former stronghold of the Taliban, on a matter of common law.
According to Interior Minister Gueant, the suspect made trips to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The French interior minister said a suspect in three deadly attacks has thrown his handgun out a window but has other weapons on him and has used them in volleys with police surrounding a building in this southwestern city.
Claude Gueant said Wednesday the 24-year-old suspect, who is surrounded by police in the building and claiming links to al-Qaeda, is talking to a police negotiator and says he'll surrender in the afternoon. The minister says police want to take him alive.
Gueant says the suspect has an AK-47 machine gun and other weapons.
Hundreds of policemen swept into a residential neighborhood in northern Toulouse early Wednesday and exchanged fire with the suspect.
Three policemen were wounded in the operation, which is still ongoing, Gueant said. The suspect's brother was arrested.
The man was known to authorities for having spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gueant said.
The shooting suspect, who is a French national, is "talking a lot, claiming his jihadist convictions" and calling himself a "mujahideen."
"He said he wants to avenge the deaths of Palestinians," the minister said, adding that he is "less explicit" about killing French paratroopers.
The man was identified from an online sale. Gueant said some 575 potential buyers answered the first victim's internet advertisement for a scooter. Police looked through them all and discovered one was sent from an IP address in the name of the suspect's mother. The suspect was already being watched because of his known Islamist radicalisation. Gueant said police made the link on Monday after the school shootings.
Authorities have been conducting a massive manhunt across a swath of southern France after seven people were killed in three attacks over the past several days, and France's terror alert level was raised to its highest level ever in the region.
A French paratrooper was killed in Toulouse on March 11, two other paratroopers were killed and one injured on Thursday in the nearby town of Montauban. The paratroopers were of Muslim and French Caribbean origin, but the interior minister said the suspect told them his ethnic origin has nothing to do with his actions. "He's after the army."
 Of the soldiers, Sarkozy, who attended their funerals said: "They were killed because they were French soldiers, members of the French army. It is the whole of the French state that has been touched... All French soldiers serve the same flag, regardless of the colour of their skin."
As he recounted the foreign missions of the young soldiers who were killed, Sarkozy's voice seemed close to breaking.
"This was not the death they had prepared for, this was not a death on the battlefield, it was a terrorist execution," Sarkozy said.
  "The conversation he has with a police officer follows a request he made to have a means of communication with the police," Gueant said on the morning of the Wednesday stand-off. "This means of communication he gave in exchange for a Colt 45 that he threw out the window.The minister did not say how the communication was taking place.
The head of the French Muslim Council, Mohammed Moussaoui, said: "These acts are in total contradiction with the foundations of this religion". In remarks quoted by AFP he added: "France's Muslims are offended by this claim of belonging to this religion."