TREBES, France — A French police officer who offered himself up to an Islamic extremist gunman in exchange for a hostage has died, raising the death toll in the attack in southern France to four. He was honored Saturday as a national hero of “exceptional courage and selflessness.”
Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame, 44, was among the first officers to respond to the attack Friday on the supermarket in the French town of Trebes.
Beltrame, who joined the elite police special forces in 2003 and served in Iraq in 2005, had organized a training session in the Aude region in December for just such a hostage situation. At the time, he armed his officers with paintball guns, according to the Depeche du Midi newspaper.
“We want to be as close to real conditions as possible,” he said then.
But when he went inside the supermarket Friday, he gave up his own weapon and volunteered himself in exchange for a female hostage.
Unbeknownst to the Morocco-born hostage-taker, he left his cellphone on so police outside could hear what was happening in the store. They stormed the building when they heard gunshots, officials said. Beltrame was fatally wounded.
Investigators quickly searched the home of the attacker, Redouane Lakdim, 25, and found what a judicial official said were notes “that alluded to the Islamic State and appeared like a last testament.” They also found a computer and telephone that will be examined for information. The official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly amid an investigation.
Investigators also found three homemade explosive devices, a handgun and a hunting knife inside the supermarket, the official said. The weapons suggested his intent to do further damage.
Two people were detained for alleged links to a terrorist enterprise, one woman close to Lakdim and a 17-year-old male friend of his, Paris prosecutor’s office said.
In addition to the four people killed by the gunman in his rampage Friday, the attacker was killed by police. Fifteen others were injured.
“Arnaud Beltrame died in the service of the nation to which he had already given so much,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. “In giving his life to end the deadly plan of a jihadi terrorist, he fell as a hero.”
French police and soldiers have been a prime target of attacks by extremists, with 10 killed in recent years, including Beltrame. Dozens of others have been wounded.
According to Macron’s statement, Beltrame also served as a member of the presidential guard and in 2012 earned one of France’s highest honors, the Order of Merit. He was married with no children.
Cedric Beltrame told RTL radio Saturday that his brother died “a hero.”
“He was well aware he had almost no chance. He was very aware of what he was doing,” Cedric Beltrame said.
Beltrame’s mother told RTL radio that for her son, “to defend the homeland” was “his reason to live.”
“He would have said to me, ‘I’m doing my job, Mom, nothing more,’” she said.
People were placing flowers in front of the Gendarmerie headquarters in the French medieval city of Carcassone to pay tribute to Beltrame. Flags at all gendarmeries were ordered to fly at half-staff.
Mayor Eric Menassi of Trebes, a town of 6,000, said people there were forever marked.
“There will be a before and an after … yesterday we were able to measure how much radicalism can affect anyone,” he said.
Macron says investigators will focus on establishing how Lakdim got his weapon and how he became radicalized.
Lakdim was known to police for petty crime and drug dealing. But he was also under surveillance and since 2014 was on the so-called Fiche S list, a government register of individuals suspected of being radicalized but who have yet to perform acts of terrorism.
Despite this, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said there was “no warning sign” that Lakdim would carry out an attack.
The four-hour drama began at 10:13 a.m. when Lakdim hijacked a car near Carcassonne, killing one person in the car and wounding the other, the prosecutor said.
Lakdim then fired six shots at police officers on their way back from jogging near Carcassonne, hitting one in the shoulder, said Yves Lefebvre of the SGP Police-FO police union.
The attacker then went to a Super U supermarket in Trebes, 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Toulouse, shooting and killing two people in the market and taking hostages. He shouted “Allahu akbar!” — the Arabic phrase for “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.
Special police units converged on the scene while authorities blocked roads.
“We heard an explosion — well, several explosions,” shopper Christian Guibbert told reporters. “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 put his wife, sister-in-law and other shoppers in the meat locker for safety.
The manager of the supermarket, who would identify herself only by her first name, Samia, called the ordeal “terrifying.” She was in her office when she heard the shots.
“Call the gendarmes,” she told her employees. “There’s a terrorist in the store.”
She said she helped evacuate as many people as possible.
The hostage whose life Beltrame saved, a store employee named Julie, was in a “catastrophic state,” she said.
During the standoff, Lakdim requested the release of Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving assailant of the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead. The interior minister suggested, however, that Abdeslam’s release wasn’t a key motive for the attack.
The IS-linked Aamaq news agency said the attacker was responding to the group’s calls to target countries in the U.S.-led coalition carrying out airstrikes against IS militants in Syria and Iraq since 2014. France has been repeatedly targeted because of its participation.
France has been on high alert since a series of extremist attacks in 2015 and 2016 that killed more than 200 people.
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Ganley reported from Paris. Associated Press journalists Thomas Adamson, Samuel Petrequin, Sylvie Corbet, Angela Charlton and Jerome Pugmire contributed from Paris.
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This story has been corrected to show dead policeman’s rank was Lt. Col., not Col. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack. The IS-linked Aamaq news agency said the attacker was responding to the group’s calls to target countries in the U.S.-led coalition carrying out airstrikes against IS militants.
