Three people have been killed in southern France after a terrorist hijacked a car and took hostages in the town of Trèbes. Police shot the gunman dead after a four-hour standoff Friday at the Super U supermarket.
The BBC reported that the attacker was heavily armed. He killed and wounded his victims in three separate incidents which began in Carcassonne, a 15 minutes’ drive from Trèbes.
Redouane Lakdim, the 26-year-old Moroccan, demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the group of ISIS attackers which carried out coordinated attacks in Paris that killed more than 130 people in November 2015.
Lakdim was well-known to French authorities for his extremist views and pledged allegiance to the terrorist organization ISIS. Lakdim had previously been arrested for petty crimes, including small-time drug-dealing.
In the town of Trebes, he charged into a Super-U supermarket, shouting, “I am a soldier of Daesh [Arabic for ISIS]!” and took hostages. The gunman was also heard shouting slogans about the war in Syria.
In a statement released online, ISIS described the hostage taker as a “soldier of the Islamic State” — language they always use which makes no distinction between ISIS-directed and ISIS inspired-attacks — and said that the killing was in response to calls by the group’s leadership to target countries fighting ISIS.
A French police officer agreed to give himself over to the gunman in exchange for the release of a hostage. That officer entered the supermarket and then reportedly shot the gunman. The police officer was also shot and seriously wounded in the fire exchange.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who was in Brussels at an EU summit, described the hostage incident as a “terror attack” and said he would return to France immediately. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it was opening an investigation into a terrorist act, as well as murder and attempted murder.
France has been hit by a string of jihadist attacks since 2015, starting in January 2015 with the assault on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in which 12 people were gunned down. Four Jewish shoppers were killed during an attack on a kosher supermarket carried out by an ISIS terrorist in Paris two days later.
Hostage-takings have long been a prominent ISIS tactic, one which the group has encouraged among its own operatives and sympathizers abroad.
[Photo: FRANCE24 / YouTube]