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The gun used to kill four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday morning was the same used in the slaying of three French soldiers in two separate incidents over the past eight days, French police said.

French police suspect the gunman – who is still at large – might have also shot dead an off-duty French soldier in Toulouse on March 11 and two soldiers in nearby Montauban last Thursday.

All the slain soldiers were all members of minority groups of North African descent. Another soldier, wounded in the second in the Montauban incident, was of Afro-Caribbean descent.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said earlier in the day there were striking similarities between the shooting at the Jewish school and the earlier incidents.

“We are struck by the similarities between the modus operandi of today’s drama and those last week even if we have to wait to have more elements from the police to confirm this hypothesis,” Sarkozy said.

The first shooting in the region took place on March 11 when Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant, was killed behind a school in Toulouse. Police believe his murderer had been waiting for him.

On Thursday three French soldiers in uniform were shot at a shopping mall in Montauban, 50 kilometers north of Toulouse. Two of them –Abel Chennouf, 24, and Private Mohamed Legouad, 26– later died of their wounds.

French police said similar ammunition was used in both shootings.

Then on Monday an unknown assailant shot dead four people -a teacher, his two children and another child- outside the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse.

Eyewitnesses said the unknown assailant drove up to the Ozar Hatorah school’s entrance on a black scooter around 8:00 a.m. and fired at the gatherers with a heavy-calibre firearm and a pistol.

Yonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old teacher from Jerusalem; his two children Aryeh, 6, and Gavriel, 3; and 8-year-old Miriam Monstango, the daughter of the school’s principle, died in the attack and several others were wounded.

“I saw two people dead in front of the school, an adult and a child… Inside, it was a vision of horror, the bodies of two small children,” a distraught father whose child attends the school told RTL radio.

“I did not find my son, apparently he fled when he saw what happened. How can they attack something as sacred as a school, attack children only sixty centimeters tall?”

Police shut the city down looking for the gunman who fled the scene of the crime.

French Interior Minister Claude Gueant ordered increased security at Jewish schools throughout the country and President Nicolas Sarkozy was en route to the southern French city to oversee the police investigation.

Gil Taieb, a vice president of the CRIF, France’s Jewish umbrella group, told The Jerusalem Post he had no doubt the attack was a hate crime.

“For someone to locate this school in a place like Toulouse means he knew what he was doing,” Taieb said. “He went there to kill Jews.”

Taieb said the community was in a state of shock.

“There are occasional anti-Semitic attacks but they are small, nothing like this,” he said. “We haven’t had something like this in at least ten years.”

Some 500,000 Jews live in France, which has the world’s third largest Jewish community.

Rabbi Avraham Weill, the chief rabbi of Toulouse, said there was no warning that the community, which numbers about 20,000, might be targeted.

“There was nothing, no phone call, no warning, ” he said over the phone from France.

Weill said his top priority was to comfort the families of the victims and prepare the bodies for burial.

The shooting was the single worst act of violence against Jews in France since 1982, when six people were killed and 22 wounded in a grenade attack carried out by Palestinians on a Jewish restaurant in Paris.

The most recent anti-Semitic murder occurred in 2006 when Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and killed by a gang in Paris in a crime that had racist overtones.

Reuters contributed to this report.