Hollande vows to fight terrorism
Paris airport attacker was on probation, says prosecutor
before being shot dead.
Anti-terror investigators Sunday released the father of the assailant but were continuing to hold his brother and cousin as they sought to build a profile of Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a 39-year-old French national.
Belgacem grabbed a female soldier and put a gun to her head, seizing her assault rifle, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins told a press conference.
“Put your weapons down, hands on your heads... In any case people are going to die,” the attacker told the troops in Molins’s account of the attack.
He tried to use the soldier as a human shield but she dropped to her knees, giving her two colleagues an opportunity to shoot him.
Ben Belgacem was carrying a petrol can in a backpack, Molins said. Officials said he had a string of criminal convictions and was previously investigated for links to radicalism.
The incident comes as France remains on high alert following a series of attacks that have claimed more than 230 lives since January 2015.
Molins said Ben Belgacem had also fired at police in the northern Paris suburb of Garges-les-Gonesse earlier on Saturday, slightly injuring one officer in the head.
Prosecutors said they opened an anti-terror investigation and that the attacker was on probation.
The attacker’s father, brother and cousin have all been detained for questioning, Molins said. All three had made contact with the police themselves.
Flights were halted at Orly for several hours following the shooting. Around 3,000 people were evacuated from the building.
Incoming flights were diverted and thousands of passengers stranded at Paris’s second-largest airport, but normal service resumed by mid-afternoon.
France goes to the polls on April 23 in the first round of a two-stage presidential election in which security is one of the main issues on voters’ minds.
Witnesses described scenes of chaos as the shooting took place.
“There was total panic,” Sofiane Slim, a check-in assistant at Royal Air Maroc, told AFP.
Elite police teams secured the airport and searched it for explosives but none were found.
Ben Belgacem is believed to have stolen a car and driven to Orly after shooting at police north of the city, Molins said.
He had committed several armed robberies and was investigated for radicalization in 2015, although he did not feature on the list of those thought to pose a high risk.
He lived in an apartment in Garges-les-Gonesse, which was searched by investigators after the shooting on Saturday.
The shooting took place on the second day of an official visit to Paris by Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate, which was unaffected.
France remains under a state of emergency after a series of terror attacks, including the November 2015 massacre in Paris and a truck attack in Nice last July.
In mid-February, a machetewielding Egyptian man attacked a soldier outside Paris’s Louvre museum before being shot and wounded.
The soldiers on patrol at Orly airport belong to Operation Sentinelle, a force of 7,000 troops deployed in the capital and other cities after the January 2015 attacks in Paris.