A gendarme hailed as a national hero after he volunteered to take the place of a female hostage being held by a terrorist gunman has been named as Lt Col Arnaud Beltrame.
The 44-year-old officer is fighting for his life in hospital after he was shot several times by the suspected Islamist extremist who killed three people and injured 16 others before being killed by French special forces.
Beltrame, described by French president Emmanuel Macron as a “credit to our country” and a hero who had “saved lives”, played a vital role in the four-hour hostage drama.
After gunman Redouane Lakdim walked into the Super U supermarket in Trèbes near Carcassonne on Friday morning and killed a member of staff and a customer, Beltrame, a local gendarme, offered to swap places with one of the hostages.
He did so knowing that France’s forces of law and order have been specifically targeted by suspected terrorists at least 10 times since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo newspaper in January 2015.
Beltrame entered the supermarket leaving his mobile telephone line open enabling French police, military and special forces that had surrounded the store to hear what was going on inside.
When shots were heard, the special forces stormed the supermarket, killing Lakdim.
François Molins, the French public prosecutor, said Beltrame had “put his life in peril when he chose to take the place of a hostage”. He added that the gunman had shot the gendarme “several times” leaving him critically injured. Beltrame was evacuated from the scene by helicopter.
Beltrame, originally from Morbihan in Brittany, a senior member of the local Aude gendarmerie, was the commanding officer of the first detachment to arrive at the supermarket soon after 11am, when the attacker entered the store.
According to the local newspaper, La Dépêche du Midi, in December 2017, Beltrame had organised a joint exercise with the local fire brigade simulating a terror attack on a supermarket in Carcassonne.
Gérard Collomb, France’s interior minister, saluted “the courage of this lieutenant-colonel, who has been seriously injured, and who substituted himself for a hostage that the terrorist was holding”.
Collomb told a press conference near the scene: “It was an act of heroism of a sort that is customary for our gendarmes and police, who commit themselves to the service of the nation in order to protect the safety and security of our fellow citizens.”
Politicians and members of the public took to social media to praise the gendarme’s “exceptional courage” and “remarkable devotion to duty”
