This is the longest negotiation in the history of the Paris BRI (Research and Intervention Brigade of the Paris Police Prefecture). It will have lasted 17 hours. The 56-year-old man who took refuge on Monday, December 20 with two hostages, a mother and her daughter, in a hardware store in rue d’Aligre, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, ended up surrendering at 8:10 a.m. Tuesday morning, after a night of negotiations with the elite police.
As with each hostage-taking, a large number of personnel were mobilized, such as snipers but also negotiators specially trained in the management of this type of crisis, assisted by a psychologist. Contact was established very quickly with the madman, who never broke off the dialogue, according to information from franceinfo.
“He always answered the phone, whether it was five minutes or half an hour”, specifies a source close to the case. Very quickly, the terrorist trail was cleared, the 56-year-old man was unknown to the intelligence services, and he had never been in a psychiatric hospital. But he is known in the neighborhood for behavioral problems.
The man holds two women, a mother, a store manager, and her daughter, at the threat of a knife. Throughout the hostage-taking, the BRI negotiators let him speak, listen to him, because the peaceful solution is their objective, as their motto proclaims. “Per verbum per gladium” (By the pen or by the sword).
“He’s talking delusional, so it’s a matter of bringing him down and taking advantage of his fits of lucidity.”
A source close to the investigationto franceinfo
The madman wants to talk to Eric Dupond-Moretti, the Minister of Justice, and Sylvie Noachovitch, Omar Raddad’s lawyer. She will also be in contact with him by phone, as she told Franceinfo. The man asks him to help him he says “to have been poisoned by doctors”. Shortly before 10 p.m., the man releases one of the two hostages, the store manager.
All night long, the BRI negotiators will continue negotiations, relentlessly, until the outcome: around 8 a.m., the madman releases his last hostage, the daughter of the store manager, and surrenders. No shots were fired. Briefly placed in police custody for “aggravated forcible confinement and willful violence with a weapon”, the man was then interned in the psychiatric infirmary of the Paris Police Prefecture, the I3P.