'Heroic' gendarme swapped places with hostage in French attack

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has joined a chorus of tributes to a local gendarme who volunteered to take the place of a female hostage at the start of the suspected terror attack in a Trèbes supermarket and was subsequently shot and badly wounded.

The unnamed gendarme had “saved lives” and was “a credit to our country”, Macron said in a brief televised address, adding the officer was fighting for his life in hospital.

France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, also 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.”

Collomb said the officer had left his telephone on a table in the Super U supermarket with an open line to the GIGN, the gendarmerie’s elite counter-terrorism unit, allowing security forces to listen to what was happening inside and storm the building as soon as they heard shooting.

Politicians and members of the public took to social media to praise the 45-year-old gendarme’s “exceptional courage” and “remarkable devotion to duty”.

French media said the officer was a senior member of the local Aude gendarmerie and the commanding officer of the first detachment to arrive at the supermarket soon after 11am, when the attacker, identified as Redouane Lakdim, 26, from Carcassonne, ran into the store, firing on shoppers and staff.

Two people were killed in the supermarket attack and a group of shoppers taken hostage. Lakdim had earlier shot dead the driver of a car before opening fire on a group of four police officers in nearby Carcassonne, wounding one in the shoulder.

The Islamic State group, to which the attacker had sworn allegiance, has claimed responsibility, without providing any evidence for the claim.