Abroad
Veteran Member
A French police officer who swapped himself for a hostage in a supermarket siege on Friday has died, officials say.
Lt-Col Arnaud Beltrame, 45, "fell as a hero" and showed "exceptional courage", French President Emmanuel Macron said.
The gendarme helped bring an end to a gunman's shooting spree that killed three in southern France.
The radical Islamist gunman, 25-year-old Redouane Lakdim, was shot dead as police brought the siege to an end.
The violence began on Friday morning in Carcassonne, where Lakdim hijacked a car. He killed a passenger - whose body was later found hidden in a bush - and injured the driver.
He then shot at a group of policemen who were out jogging, wounding one of them.
Lakdim is then believed to have driven a short distance to the small town of Trèbes, where he stormed into the Super-U supermarket, shouting, "I am a soldier of Daesh [Islamic State]!"
He killed two people - a customer and a store worker - before seizing others as hostages.
Mr Collomb told reporters on Friday that police officers had managed to get some people out of the supermarket but the gunman had held one woman backas a human shield.
It was at this point, he said, that Lt-Col Beltrame had volunteered to swap himself for her.
As he did so, he left his mobile phone on a table with an open line so that police outside could monitor the situation.
Lakdim, was born in April 1992 in Morocco and had French nationality. He was known to French intelligence services.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said he had been on an extremist watch-list due to "his radicalisation and his links with the Salafist movement", a hardline offshoot of Sunni Islam. However, subsequent investigations by intelligence services had not turned up any signs he would act, he said.
In 2011 Lakdim was found guilty of carrying a prohibited weapon and in 2015 he was convicted for drug use and refusing a court order, Mr Molins said.
Earlier, Mr Collomb said that though Lakdim had been known to authorities as a petty criminal, they "did not think he had been radicalised".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43525267