Terror returns to France
France’s interior ministry is describing the suspect in a supermarket shooting and hostagetaking yesterday as a 26-year-old Moroccan-born petty criminal who was considered radicalised and under police surveillance.
Interior Minister Gerard Collomb identified the suspect, who killed three people, as Redouane Lakdim.
Investigators think the suspect hijacked a car after leaving the nearby city of Carcassonne and one of the people in the hijacked vehicle was killed.
Collomb said Lakdim then shot at a group of police officers before hiding inside the supermarket, where two more people were killed.
He said Lakdim acted alone. After an hours-long standoff, the 25-year-old attacker was slain as elite police forces stormed the supermarket. They were aided by a heroic police officer who had offered himself up in a hostage swap and suffered life-threatening wounds as a result – one of 16 people injured in the day’s violence.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack near Carcassonne, a medieval city beloved by tourists, and in the town of Trebes. It was the deadliest attack in France since Emmanuel Macron became president last May.
The officer who volunteered to take the place of a female hostage was identified as Colonel Arnaud Beltrame. He managed to surreptitiously leave his cellphone on so that police outside could hear what was going on inside the supermarket. Officials said that once they heard shots inside the market, they decided to storm it.
Macron said Beltrame ‘‘saved lives’’.
He said investigators would focus on establishing how the gunman got his weapon, and how he became radicalised.
Authorities yesterday searched a vehicle and a building in central Carcassonne.
Lakdim was known to police for petty crime and drug dealing. But he was also under surveillance, and since 2014 had been on the socalled ‘‘Fiche S’’ list, a government register of individuals suspected of being radicalised but who have yet to perform acts of terrorism.
Despite this, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins there was ‘‘no warning sign’’ that Lakdim would carry out an extremist attack.
A woman close to Lakdim was taken into custody over alleged links with a terrorist enterprise, Molins said. He did not identify her.
The four-hour drama began when Lakdim hijacked a car near Carcassonne, killing one person in the car and wounding the other, Molins said.
Lakdim then fired six shots at police officers who were on their way back from jogging near Carcassonne, said Yves Lefebvre, secretary-general of the SGP Police-FO police union. The police were wearing athletic clothes with police insignia. One officer was hit in the shoulder, but the injury was not serious.
Lakdim then went to a Super U supermarket in nearby Trebes, 100 kilometres southeast of Toulouse, shooting and killing two people and taking an unknown number of hostages. Special police units converged on the scene while authorities blocked roads and urged residents to stay away.
The attacker shouted ‘‘Allahu akbar! (God is great)’’ and said he was a ‘‘soldier of the Islamic State’’ as he entered the Super U, where about 50 people were inside, Molins said.
‘‘We heard an explosion – well, several explosions,’’ shopper Christian Guibbert told reporters. ‘‘I went to see what was happening and I saw a man lying on the floor and another person, very agitated, who had a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.’’
Guibbert said he led his wife and sister-in-law and nearby customers into the meat locker. He then went back to see where the assailant was, and called police to describe the situation.
‘‘At that moment, [the gunman] ran after me. Of course I left, I lost him, and when I turned around he wasn’t there any more. I took an emergency door police arrive.’’
Another witness, an employee of the supermarket’s butchery department identified only by his first name, Jacky, told Europe 1 radio he ‘‘heard people shouting and a big boom’’.
‘‘It was a gunshot,’’ he ‘‘Then a second gunshot. and saw the said. After that, my colleagues came toward me saying, ‘Come on Jacky, we need to leave! There’s someone who’s firing shots, he’s shouting ‘‘Allahu akbar’’, and he’s shot people and he’s shooting at everything’.’’
Jacky said they left using an emergency exit behind the butcher’s stall. ‘‘We also helped people get out.’’
During the standoff, Lakdim requested the release of Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving assailant of the November 13, 2015 terror attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.
Collomb suggested, however, that Abdeslam’s release was not a key motive for the attack.
The Isis-linked Aamaq news agency said the attacker was responding to the group’s calls to target countries in the United Statesled coalition carrying out air strikes against Isis militants in Syria and Iraq since 2014. France has been repeatedly targeted because of its participation.
Collomb and Molins praised Beltrame, who Molins said ‘‘at the risk of his life took the choice to take the place of the hostages’’.
The gunman shot Beltrame several times after threatening to blow up the supermarket if police entered, Molins added.
BFM television said Beltrame recently took part in a training exercise simulating a terrorist attack.
As the supermarket standoff reached a crescendo, police heard gunshots inside the building and decided that elite forces had to storm it. Lakdim was killed and two officers were wounded during the assault, Collomb said.
France has been on high alert since a series of extremist attacks in 2015 and 2016 that killed more than 200 people. While it hadn’t had an attack for several months, ‘‘the threat remains high’’, Macron said, describing ongoing risks from ‘‘several individuals who radicalised themselves’’.
Macron pushed through a tough counterterrorism law last year that gives police extra powers to conduct searches and hold people under house arrest.
In Brussels, German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared with Macron and said, ‘‘When it comes to terrorist threats, we stand by France.’’
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the Eiffel Tower would turn its lights off at midnight in tribute to the victims.
At the national stadium outside Paris, 80,000 football fans and the national teams of France and Colombia observed a minute of silence to honour those killed in the attacks. Poignantly, the stadium itself was the site of bloodshed in the deadly Paris attacks in 2015.