Three Dead After Jihadist Goes on Shooting Rampage in Southern France

A policeman was shot and a man took hostages at a supermarket in two separate incidents in the same area of Southwest France on Friday.  The policeman was shot in the town of Carcassonne, while a gunman fired shots during a hostage-taking Friday morning at a supermarket in the town of Trebes, a fifteen minutes’ drive away.

The man “entered the Super U supermarket at around 11:15 am and shots were heard,” a source said of the Trebes incident. Local authorities tweeted that the area was out-of-bounds to the public.

The gunman who fired shots during a hostage-taking situation on Friday morning at a supermarket in Southwest France claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group (IS), the local prosecutor’s office said.

Reports say he was heavily armed and demanding the release of Salah Abdeslam, one of the suspected assailants in the Paris attacks of Nov. 13, 2015, in which one hundred and thirty people were killed at the Bataclan theater and at other places across the French capital.

Officials named the suspected gunman as twenty-six-year-old Redouane Lakdim. It is unclear if he has acted alone.