A gunman who took six people hostage in a bank in northern France on Thursday surrendered to elite police after a six-hour operation to free his captives.
The hostage-taker, a 34-year-old with a history of mental illness, emerged slowly from the building wearing a balaclava and with his hands turned palms-up, before officers with weapons raised moved in and handcuffed him.
All of the hostages were unharmed, although in shock, Denis Jacob of the Alternative Police Trade Union said.
Photo: AFP
Bomb squad personnel acted after the man told officers that there were explosives in a bag.
He had been armed with a handgun, a national police representative said.
The man took six people hostage — five were subsequently released and the sixth taken to safety after the man was arrested, Jacob added.
The hostage-taker is believed to have Islamist sympathies, two police union officials said, but there was no official confirmation of this.
Yves Lefebvre, head of another police union, SGP Unite, said that the hostage-taker in Le Havre, a town of about 170,000 people on the English Channel, was known to law enforcement authorities and on a security service watch list.
“We know that he has been radicalized and suffers a serious psychiatric illness,” he said.
Another source, a senior police official, said that during the incident the man spoke in support of the Palestinian cause.
He walked out of the bank with what appeared to be a green-colored flag draped around his shoulders.
Police had cordoned off the area around the bank on Boulevard de Strasbourg, a wide thoroughfare in the center of Le Havre.
An employee at a Burger King outlet about 100m from the bank said that police had told them to lock an entrance on the same street as the hostage-taking, but had not ordered them to shut.
When the fifth hostage was freed, a man in a pink shirt could be seen in television footage being led away from the bank by a police officer in full protective gear.
“Very proud and grateful,” Le Havre Mayor Edouard Philippe, a former French prime minister, wrote on Twitter in praise of the police.
The hostages were seized in a branch of Bred Bank, a medium-sized lender, on the ground floor of a six-story residential building.
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