Tricolore flies at half-mast as Macron hails ‘national hero’
FRANCE: Flags were flown at half-mast in gendarme stations across France yesterday as the country honoured police officer Arnaud Beltrame.
He was declared a national hero by President Emmanuel Macron after trading places with a woman being held hostage by an Islamist gunman.
‘‘Arnaud Beltrame died in the service of the nation to which he had already given so much,’’ Macron aid. ‘‘In giving his life to end the deadly plan of a jihadi terrorist, he fell as a hero.’’
The 44-year-old Lieutenant Colonel died in hospital overnight after swapping himself for a hostage being held in a supermarket in the south-western town of Trebes on Saturday.
Unbeknownst to his Moroccoborn captor, who had by then killed three people in a shooting spree and wounded 16 more, he left his mobile phone on so police outside could hear what was happening. They stormed the building when they heard gunfire and shot the hostage-taker dead.
Beltrame - who was shot and stabbed in the attack - was airlifted to a nearby hospital but died a few hours later. Tributes to the officer, who first took his place among the elite police special forces in 2003 and was decorated in 2007 after serving in Iraq, flooded in yesterday.
The president was among the first to respond, with a long statement listing the gendarme’s glittering career - which included four years handling security at the Elysee - and saying he ‘‘deserved the respect and admiration of the entire nation’’.
The officer’s name was the top trending hashtag on the French edition of Twitter, with members of the public in France and around the world paying tribute to what many of them called a ‘‘true hero’’.
The name of the 25-year-old Islamist hostage-taker, Redouane Lakdim, who claimed allegiance to Islamic State, was the second mostused term on Twitter.
- Telegraph Group