Hostage cop dies after attack
Hero secretly revealed events inside store to update officers during terror attack.
AFrench police officer who swapped himself for a hostage in a supermarket siege in Trebes has died, officials said last night.
Gendarme Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame had earlier been hailed a hero by French President Emmanuel Macron.
He helped end a gunman’s shooting spree that killed three and wounded 16, including Beltrame.
The radical Islamist gunman, 25-year-old Redouane Lakdim, was shot dead as police ended the siege.
Announcing the police officer’s death on Twitter, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said France would never forget “his heroism, bravery, his sacrifice”.
Beltrame offered himself up unarmed to the gunman in exchange for a female hostage. He managed to surreptitiously leave his cellphone on so police outside could hear what was going on inside the supermarket.
Officials said once they heard shots in the store, they stormed it, killing the gunman.
Earlier the attacker held up a car, opened fire on police and then took hostages, screaming “Allahu Akbar”. Lakdim demanded the release of the only surviving member of the Isis cell that attacked Paris in November, 2015.
He demanded the liberation of jihadi Salah Abdeslam, who was once Europe’s most wanted fugitive, Collomb said.
It is unclear if Lakdim had any connection with Isis or with Abdeslam, 28. Isis claimed Lakdim — who was known to French police for petty crime and drug-dealing — was one of its “soldiers”.
French officials didn’t say what, if anything, Lakdim promised in exchange for Abdeslam’s freedom.
Abdeslam likely holds importance for would-be attackers in France as the only living suspect thought to have participated directly in the Paris attacks. Last month, he emerged from nearly two years of isolation in a French prison to be tried in Brussels over the shoot-out that resulted in his capture. A verdict is due on April 29.
Abdeslam has refused to answer the French investigators’ questions regarding the carnage in Paris that resonated around the world.
It’s not the first time a gunman and hostage-taker in a French supermarket has made a demand on behalf of fellow jihadis.
In January 2015, Amedy Coulibaly took over a kosher supermarket and demanded police back off their pursuit of two brothers who had killed staff members of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo days earlier. Coulibaly killed four hostages before he was shot and killed.
And 10 months later, the Paris attacks at multiple venues killed 130 people.
Abdeslam is back in solitary confinement in France and is expected to go on trial in that country in 2019.
— AP, AAP