Thursday August 6, 4:30 p.m. A 34-year-old man walks into a Banque Populaire - Bred bank branch located at 122 boulevard de Strasbourg, in the city center of Le Havre (Seine-Maritime). For long hours, he held seven bank employees hostage, before releasing them one by one and then finally surrendering to the police.
Read also: End of the hostage-taking in Le Havre after the surrender of the suspect
The investigation, opened for "attempted armed robbery" and "sequestration", will determine the motivations of the suspect, whose profile is beginning to emerge. In a video published shortly after midnight on Twitter, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, who followed the events from Place Beauveau, gave the first elements.
“The individual is known to the services of the Ministry of the Interior, Justice and Health for acts of common law delinquency that I would describe as serious, accompanied by various convictions. He was also known to have a psychiatric history. He was finally known for radicalization by the Seine-Maritime prefecture and territorial intelligence , ” said the minister. A police source specifies in Figaro that it was not stuck S.
Sentenced in 2016
According to AFP information confirmed in Le Figaro by a source close to the case, the thirty-something was not his first hostage-taking. On Friday, October 18, 2013, shortly before 5 p.m., he entered with a handgun in a CIC bank branch located at 77 avenue des Gobelins, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.
He had held four people hostage by claiming accommodation for himself and his son. Like this Thursday, August 6 in Le Havre, he freed the hostages one by one before finally surrendering to the police shortly after 7 p.m. The director of the Paris judicial police at the time declared that he was "known to the police and mental health services" .
Read also: Hostage-taking in Paris: the armed man surrendered
The man had been taken into custody and then indicted. After two months in pre-trial detention, he was placed under judicial supervision. Sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison, including three years suspended, he completed his entire sentence under an electronic bracelet, while continuing to stay in a psychiatric hospital.