On 23 March 2018, there was a series of Islamist terrorist attacks in the towns of Carcassonne and Trèbes in southern France. Redouane Lakdim, a 25-year-old French Moroccan (born 11 April 1992 in Taza, Morocco), shot the two occupants of a car in Carcassonne, killing the passenger and hijacking it. He then opened fire on four police officers, seriously wounding one. Lakdim drove to nearby Trèbes, where he stormed a Super U supermarket, killing two civilians, wounding others, and taking at least one hostage. He swore allegiance to the Islamic State and demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect of the November 2015 Paris attacks.
A senior gendarmerie officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, voluntarily swapped places with a hostage. After a three-hour stand-off, Lakdim shot and fatally stabbed Beltrame. A police tactical unit immediately stormed the building and killed Lakdim. He was named a "soldier of the Islamic State" by the Amaq News Agency, and the President of France called the attacks an act of Islamist terrorism. Five people were killed in the attacks, including the perpetrator, and fifteen were wounded.
Background
Beginning in 2015, Europe was rocked by a series of terrorist attacks inspired by Islamic extremism, particularly by the Islamic State (ISIS). France in particular was affected by a series of attacks in January and in November, which killed 157 people in aggregate. By 2018, France was the European nation most affected by terrorist attacks inspired or directed by ISIS—from January 2015 to December 2018, 249 people were killed in France by Islamic terrorist attacks—and its security apparatuses were surveilling about 20,000 potential terrorists. Islamic terrorist attacks in France by 2018 mostly targeted law enforcement, rather than focusing on causing the maximum number of civilian casualties; nine out of 11 attacks in France in 2017 were directed against French law enforcement.
Redouane Lakdim
Redouane Lakdim was born in Morocco on 11 April 1992 and became a naturalized citizen of France in 2004 when his father attained French citizenship. By 2018, Lakdim lived in Ozanam, a low-income neighborhood of the French city of Carcassonne, with his parents and sisters. Neighbors interviewed after the Carcassonne and Trèbes attack described him as a "pleasant young man". He was buried on 29 March 2018.
Lakdim was known to the police prior to the attacks and had been investigated as a possible extremist. In 2011, he was given a suspended sentence of a month in prison for possession of illegal weaponry and was imprisoned for August 2016 following a conviction, in 2015, for possession and use of narcotics and a refusal to comply with a court order. Lakdim, a devout Muslim, was noted by French authorities as a potential security hazard (Fiche S), then monitored in 2016 and 2017 on the suspicion that he had been radicalized. A search of his home after his death found notes referring to ISIS in what appeared to be a will. Lakdim's girlfriend was also known to French security services.
Attacks and hostage crisis
At 10:13 a.m., after taking a sister to school, Lakdim approached a parked Opel Corsa and shot its two occupants with a handgun, killing Jean Mazières, a retired winemaker, and critically injuring Renato Silva, a Portuguese citizen. Lakdim stole the vehicle and drove to the barracks of the 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment. When no soldiers exited the barracks, he drove away and spotted four policemen of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité jogging back to their barracks. From the vehicle, Lakdim fired six times at the officers, severely injuring one. After attempting without success to hit the officers with the vehicle, Lakdim drove to Trèbes.
Lakdim arrived at Trèbes's Super U supermarket at 10:38 a.m., and entered the store, which at that moment contained 50 people. Lakdim shouted "Allahu akbar" and his allegiance to ISIS, and shot and killed the store's butcher, Christian Medves, and Hervé Sosna, a retired mason. Hearing the gunshots, 20 occupants of the store escaped or hid in its cold store; those unable to were ordered by Lakdim to lie on the ground. He ordered one of the hostages to call the French police and inform them that he had taken hostages and again declared his allegiance to ISIS.