It was a morning like any other at Commandant Charcot's kindergarten in Neuilly-sur-Seine on Thursday, May 13, 1993. In the class of teacher Laurence Dreyfus, the twenty-one children aged three to four are quietly preparing for Mother's Day when at 9:30 am a man hooded in black under a motorcycle helmet enters the room. "This is a hostage-taking, avoid tragedy," he wrote to police. The man holds a box that he claims is "a bomb", and threatens to use the children as "shields". He threatens to blow everything up if he is not given 100 million francs. The message is signed "HB" for "Human Bomb".
Nicolas Sarkozy on the front line
While large police forces are deployed, distraught parents gather outside the school, television crews settle. From his office in Bercy the Minister of the Budget and Mayor of Neuilly, Nicolas Sarkozy, rushes. It was he who led the negotiations with Louis Bayon, the leader of the Raid, the prefect Charles-Noël Hardy and the public prosecutor Pierre Lyon-Caen. At the Ministry of the Interior, Charles Pasqua set up a crisis unit with his close collaborators.
Nicolas Sarkozy, Mayor of Neuilly, Minister of the Budget and Government Spokesman in front of the Commandant Charcot kindergarten in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 13 May 1993. PASCAL PAVANI/AFP
We did not know at first if it was "very serious" or if it was "a very bad hoax", confided Nicolas Sarkozy recently on RTL. But quickly, the minister finds himself facing the hostage-taker who holds a detonator in his hand. He managed to free one child, then another. "Whoever passed within my reach, I took it," he will later recount. "You are nice, but I want to see my mother ...", moans the little Louis Hauvette who will confide 25 years later in the Figaro.
The teacher and the doctor, two heroines
Several toddlers are released in dribs and drabs, until one o'clock in the morning. But six girls are still being held. A female doctor of the fire brigade, Évelyne Lambert, joined the teacher in the booby-trapped room of twenty-one sticks of dynamite. Laurence Dreyfus, free to circulate, refuses to leave her "little ones". The madman, however, shows towards them "a paternal kindness, calling them by their first names, playing with them, consoling those who whined," reported Le Figaro the day after the hostage-taking.
On Friday, negotiators proposed the installation of cameras in the classroom to reassure parents, HB agreed. "In reality," reveals Prefect Hardy at the time, "this device was rather intended for us. It would have been cruel for parents to see their children on a screen without being able to approach them." A microphone is placed, without the knowledge of the madman, this time.
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On Saturday night, the man appears less coherent, suicidal. "You will never take me alive," he repeats. It is time to act.
Killed in his sleep?
In the early morning, the man dozes, Evelyne Lambert gives the signal. Four policemen enter the classroom two by two by hooking the door on the garden side. It's 7:25. All observers were evacuated in fear of an explosion. During the action, a little one makes a little noise. "HB" sketches a gesture, says Le Figaro. "The police immediately opened fire with their weapons with silencers. Three bullets in the head. The children saw nothing, heard nothing.
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The madman is dead, force must remain to the law, "concludes martial Charles Pasqua. A statement that shocks and launches the controversy relayed by the union of the magistrature which accuses in a letter the commando of the Raid to have "executed" the hostage-taker asleep by sleeping pills. Self-defense will finally be retained by the justice which will render a dismissal.
It is only after his death that the identity of the hooded man is discovered. This is Erick Schmitt, a 42-year-old former entrepreneur who experienced good years and then the bitter taste of bankruptcy and legal proceedings. Unemployed, depressed and full of pent-up anger, he cracked and fomented this delirious terrorist project.
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