President Emmanuel Macron has led a national ceremony this morning paying tribute to a heroic policeman who died after swapping with a female hostage during a jihadist attack, reports The Telegraph.
Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, 44, was was killed along with three others in the shooting spree last Friday in the southwestern towns of Carcassonne and nearby Trebes.
“His greatness has stunned France,” Mr Macron told family members, hundreds of dignitaries and “brothers in arms” at a solemn ceremony at Paris’ Invalides near Napoleon’s tomb. “The intolerable can never win the day,” said the president.
His act was the epitome of France’s “spirit of resistance” against Islamist barbarity, he added.
Mr Beltrame who had been part of an elite unit, had taken the place of a female employee held as a final hostage in a supermarket by 25-year-old gunman Radouane Lakdim, who pledged allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Mr Macron posthumously made the slain gendarme the commander of the Legion of Honour. The president placed France’s highest award on Mr Beltrame’s coffin draped in the French flag with his military cap laid upon it.
France has lost more than 240 lives to jihadists over the past three years, but this attack was the country's worst since Mr Macron became president last May.
Earlier, police stations paused for a minute's silence.
The Islamist assailant had also shot dead the passenger of a car he hijacked in Carcassonne and two people in the supermarket he had besieged in Trebes.
Mr Beltrame took the place of the woman Lakdim was using as a human shield, but the Islamist shot the gendarme and slit his throat, leading police to intervene and shoot the attacker dead.