His death moved the whole country.

By taking the place of a hostage, gendarme Arnaud Beltrame lost his life and received national tribute.

Six years later, the trial of the relatives of the author of the Trèbes and Carcassonne attacks, which left four people dead in 2018, opens in Paris this Monday at 10:00 a.m. 

The attacker, Radouane Lakdim, was killed during the GIGN attack in a supermarket in Trèbes (Aude) where he had taken refuge.

Seven people from his entourage – six men and a woman – will be tried for “criminal terrorist association” for a month. 

Hostage taking at Super U 

On the morning of March 23, 2018, this 25-year-old drug dealer from a difficult city in Carcassonne, very radicalized and monitored for this (S file), went to a parking lot which had the reputation of being a homosexual meeting place. 

He targets two men in a car.

One of them, 61 years old, died.

The other man will be seriously injured.  

The assailant continued his journey by car to Carcassonne, came across four police officers jogging, and fired in their direction.

One of them will be seriously injured. 

A little before 10:30 a.m., Radouane Lakdim arrives at the Super U in Trèbes, a town neighboring Carcassonne.

There, he killed the store's 50-year-old head butcher and a customer, a 65-year-old retired mason, each with a bullet to the head.  

He shouts "Allah Akbar", insults people between the shelves, brandishes his revolver, then he takes hostage the 39-year-old agent hidden in the room behind the reception stand. 

He orders her to call the police.

On the phone, he leaves no doubt about his motivations, presenting himself as a "brigadier of the Islamic State" or evoking France's bombings in Syria. 

Also read: Attacks in Aude: the revolution in French anti-terrorism will not have been enough to avoid the worst

National tribute 

“I've wanted to do this for a long time,” he also told the gendarmes, boasting of his crimes committed earlier in the morning: “I killed the CRS”, “I lit two fags (.. .) two bullets in the head, mercilessly". 

After an hour, Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, 44, entered and convinced the jihadist to take him hostage instead of the agent. 

The GIGN (elite intervention unit of the gendarmerie) attacked around 2:30 p.m. Radouane Lakdim was shot dead.

Arnaud Beltrame, seriously injured with a knife in the neck by the assailant, died in hospital.  

A national tribute was paid a few days later at the Invalides in Paris, to the man who was unanimously described as a “hero”.

“His greatness stunned France,” President Emmanuel Macron said. 

Also read: Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, a hero with a clear trajectory of excellence

The attack was claimed by the Islamic State (IS) organization, an opportunistic claim according to investigators, with no contact with the attacker having been established. 

Before the special assize court of Paris, none of the seven relatives of Radouane Lakdim – six men and a woman aged 24 to 35, most of them appearing free under judicial supervision – will be tried for complicity in the crimes committed.  

They will appear above all for "criminal terrorist association", punishable by a maximum of 30 years of criminal imprisonment. 

“Kill the disbelievers” 

In the dock: Marine Pequignot, at the time Radouane Lakdim's girlfriend (she was 18 at the time), also very radicalized.

She knew, according to the prosecution, what he was capable of.  

To investigators, she explained that he loved weapons (he had "five or six machetes and knives", "two shotguns", a pistol) and often said that "compared to the unbelievers, he was going to lose his temper." ". 

Radouane Lakdim's brother-in-law, Ahmed Arfaoui, 29, will also be tried, suspected in particular of having "disasterly cleaned" the jihadist's apartment on the day of the attack before the search, by taking a large full bag.  

Also referred to the court is Samir Manaa, 28, the friend who accompanied Radouane Lakdim to the hunting and fishing store where the assailant bought the knife which fatally injured Arnaud Beltrame.

For the prosecution, this friend nevertheless knew "his jihadist inclinations and his dangerousness". 

Considered the "head" of drug trafficking in the city, Reda El Yaakoubi, 34, is notably accused of having made Radouane Lakdim work, "thereby helping materially and financially" the assailant while he was " perfectly aware" of his state of mind: Radouane Lakdim posed on social networks with weapons against a backdrop of calls for jihad, regularly spoke of "killing disbelievers", and warned that he would appear "on BFMTV", according to relatives. 

The trial is scheduled to last until February 23. 

With AFP 

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