Beltrame won medal for Iraq duty

The heroic French policeman who died yesterday after offering himself as a hostage in a militant hold-up at a supermarket was an elite officer who had been decorated for his bravery in Iraq.

A senior officer in the gendarmerie, a police force which is part of the French military, Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, 45, was married with no children. Beltrame’s brother Cedric said he would have known all too well the risk he was taking.

“He certainly knew he didn’t stand a chance,” he said.

“He gave his life for another.”

And Beltrame’s mother, who has not been named, said she was unsurprised her son would put others’ lives before his own.

“He was always like that — he’s someone who ever since he was born did everything for his country,” she told RTL radio.

“He would tell me, ‘Mum, I do my job. That’s all.’”

He graduated in 1999 from France’s top military college, SaintCyr, where his superiors described him as someone who “fought until the end and never gave up”, Macron said.

He was one of just a handful of candidates chosen to join the gendarmerie’s elite GSIGN force in 2003 and was deployed to Iraq in 2005, where he won a Cross for Military Valour.

He joined the Republican Guard protecting the presidential palace after returning from Iraq, and also worked as an adviser to the environment ministry.

He had been named just last year as deputy chief of the gendarmerie in the Aude, where Lakdim unleashed his shooting spree in the medieval town of Carcassonne before driving to the supermarket in nearby Trebes.