On Thursday morning, a man on the rampage was shot dead by police officers from the RAID branch in Marseille. He had threatened to set fire to his block of flats and threw a Molotov cocktail at the police officers.
A 34-year-old gunman was killed on Thursday morning in Rue Fontaine-d’Arménie in the first arrondissement of Marseille by shots fired by police officers from the RAID special unit, the police prefect and the deputy public prosecutor announced at a press conference.
The Marseille public prosecutor’s office launched two investigations into the case. The first for “attempted murder of a public official” and “death threats” and the second to ensure that the suspect was fatally wounded in self-defence. The suspect threatened to set fire to his building and barricaded himself in his flat at around 7am. He first attacked cleaners by threatening them with a sabre, and then the first arriving police officers, who were pelted with at least one Molotov cocktail, as an amateur video we obtained shows. In these images, the officers can be seen standing in the hallway outside the gunman’s flat. He throws a Molotov cocktail at them and the law enforcement officers quickly back away to avoid being hit by the burning cocktail. A perimeter was then set up and RAID police arrived at the scene at around 10am. Despite negotiations, the suspect refused to surrender. The elite police officers then intervened. The perpetrator had a bottle filled with petrol in one hand and a firelighter in the other,” explained the prosecutor. According to a source familiar with the case, the man was well known to the police and the courts. Actu17