Alwaght- Four people, including a French policeman who swapped himself for a hostage, have been killed at an assailant inside a supermarket in the southern French town of Trebes.
Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame was shot in the neck on Friday after offering to take the place of a woman during hostage situation at the Super U supermarket. The 45-year-old police officer died of his wounds, Interior Minister Gérard Collomb announced on Saturday
Three other people were also killed and 16 were wounded after the gunman held up a car, opened fire on police and then took hostages in a supermarket in southern France.
The attacker, Radouane Lakdim, 26, a Moroccan-born French national, was a petty criminal already on the radar of French police for his links to radical Salafist networks, authorities said.
When he burst into the supermarket Friday, he shouted he was a soldier from ISIS, witnesses said, before opening fire and killing a worker and a customer. He was shot dead by police on the scene.
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 radicalised but who have not performed acts of violence.
Despite this, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said there was "no warning sign" that Lakdim would carry out an attack.
A woman close to Lakdim was taken into custody over alleged links with a "terrorist enterprise", Molins said. He did not identify her.
The attack began at 10:13am 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 who were on their way back from jogging near Carcassonne, said Yves Lefebvre, secretary-general of SGP Police-FO police union.
The police were wearing athletic clothes with police insignia. One officer was hit in the shoulder, but the injury was not serious, Lefebvre said.
Lakdim then went to a Super U supermarket in nearby Trebes, 100km southeast of Toulouse, shooting and killing two people in the market and taking an unknown number of hostages.
Special police units converged on the scene while authorities blocked roads and urged residents to stay away.
He shouted "Allahu akbar! (God is great)" and said he was a "soldier of the Islamic State (ISIL)" as he entered the Super U, where about 50 people were inside, Molins said.
"We heard an explosion - well, several explosions," shopper Christian Guibbert told reporters. "I went to see what was happening and 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."
During the standoff, Lakdim requested the release of Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving assailant of the November 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 ISIL-linked Aamaq website said the attacker was responding to the group's calls to target countries in the US-led coalition carrying out air raids against ISIL fighters 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 attacks in 2015 and 2016 that killed more than 200 people.
