France honors hero officer who swapped places with hostage
FRANCE - Mourners clutching umbrellas lined the streets of Paris yesterday to honor the police officer who died after swapping places with a hostage during a terror attack in southern France last Friday.
Under gray skies, a cavalcade of officers on motorbikes and horseback led the funeral procession through the capital towards the Hotel des Invalides, a historic building dedicated to France’s servicemen and women. There French President Emmanuel Macron was set to lead the commemoration to Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame, 45, who offered to take the place of a female hostage during an attack by an ISIS supporter on a supermarket in Trèbes.
Beltrame was shot in the neck during the attack, dying from his wounds later that day.
The officer will posthumously be awarded the prestigious “Commander of the Legion d’Honneur” medal. His attacker, Radouane Lakdim, 26, a Moroccan-born French national, was a petty criminal already on the radar of French police for his links to radical Salafist networks, authorities said.
When he burst into the supermarket Friday, he shouted he was a soldier from ISIS, witnesses said, before opening fire and killing a worker and a customer. He was shot dead by police on the scene. The attacker killed four people in total. Along with Beltrame, two other people died and more than a dozen were wounded in the supermarket raid. He also killed another person earlier Friday while stealing a car.
Police found two unexploded homemade bombs, a 7.65 mm pistol and a hunting knife when they searched the market after the attack, a French judicial source told CNN.
(CNN)