3 French officers slain answering abuse call

PARIS — A gunman killed three police officers who were responding early Wednesday in central France to reports of domestic violence, authorities said. The gunman was later found dead.

The officers had been called to the scene in an isolated hamlet near St.-Just, a small village in the Puy-de-Dome region, to help a woman who had sought refuge on the roof of a house after being beaten by her partner, according to the French Interior Ministry.

The man shot at the police when they arrived, killing one officer, identified by the ministry as Arno Mavel, 21, and wounding a second in the thigh. The man then fired at two more officers as they approached the house. The officers — identified by the ministry as Cyrille Morel, 45, and Remi Dupuis, 37 — were killed.

The officers were members of France’s gendarmerie — the force that oversees smaller towns and rural and suburban areas.

The attack prompted swift condemnation. Gerald Darmanin, the French interior minister, said the officers died in “particularly despicable circumstances” after a “courageous and heroic” intervention to help the woman and her child.

“We owe them respect and gratitude,” Darmanin said, speaking to reporters in Ambert, a town near St.-Just. He said the episode was one of the deadliest in the gendarmerie’s history.

“To protect us, our forces risk their lives,” President Emmanuel Macron said of the officers on Twitter. “They are our heroes.”

Police reinforcements quickly cordoned off the area. The gunman, who has not been identified, was found dead several hours later, Darmanin said, although the exact circumstances of his death were unclear.

Francois Chautard, the mayor of St.-Just, a village with about 150 residents, told the BFM-TV news channel that the officers were shot after arriving at the scene of a domestic dispute and that the gunman then set the house on fire.

“The house is totally destroyed,” Chautard said.

French police have been repeatedly targeted in terrorist attacks in recent years, but deadly gun violence against officers is otherwise rare.

Twenty-five French police officers and gendarmes were killed in the line of duty in 2018, up from 15 in 2017, according to official statistics. Thirteen of those deaths in 2018 were directly related to security operations. There have been 11 such deaths in 2020, including the officers killed Wednesday, the interior minister said.

Marlene Schiappa, France’s junior minister for citizenship, told BFM-TV that the shooting was proof that perpetrators of domestic violence are a danger to society.

“These are people who think they own their wife or partner,” Schiappa said, adding that such people “will use any means to maintain that possession,” including violence.

Macron has made tackling domestic abuse one of his government’s priorities, and awareness about violence against women has surged in recent years. In 2019, nearly 150 women in France were killed by a partner or former partner, a 21% increase from the previous year, according to official statistics.

The French Parliament recently approved a law to ease medical confidentiality restrictions in cases where there is an “immediate danger” of violence, enabling practitioners to flag cases to the legal authorities without a patient’s consent.

The law also increased prison terms for people convicted of harassing their partners and criminalized the geolocation of one’s partner without consent.