3 Police Officers in France Are Killed After Responding to Domestic Abuse Report

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/world/europe/france-police-shooting-domestic-abuse.html

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PARIS — A heavily armed gunman in central France killed three police officers responding early Wednesday to reports of domestic abuse, in a rare outburst of deadly violence against French security forces that a local prosecutor described as a “war scene.” The gunman was later found dead.

The officers had been called to a private residence in an isolated hamlet near St.-Just, a small village in the Puy-de-Dôme region of France, about 50 miles southeast of Clermont-Ferrand, to help a woman who had sought refuge on her roof after being beaten by her partner.

The deaths of the officers and the plight of the woman shocked France, where deadly violence against the police is uncommon and where concern has been growing in recent years over the scourge of domestic violence.

“It’s an extremely complex crime scene, and at this time we are far from having all of the answers,” Éric Maillaud, the Clermont-Ferrand prosecutor, said in an emotional news conference.

Mr. Maillaud identified the shooter as Frédérik Limol, a 48-year-old man with a “very worrying profile.” Mr. Limol was an avid survivalist and a fervent Catholic who, according to the prosecutor, seemed to believe that the end of the world was near. He had undergone brief military training and was an expert shooter.

The first officers arrived at the scene after receiving a distress call on Tuesday evening from a friend of Mr. Limol’s partner, identified as Sandrine S., who had told her friend that Mr. Limol was beating her. The couple lived in a semi-mountainous area not far from St.-Just, a village with roughly 150 residents. At some point, before or after arrival of the officers, a fire erupted in the house, the prosecutor said, but Sandrine S. was rescued without further harm.

Mr. Limol shot at the officers without warning when they arrived, killing one, identified by the ministry as Arno Mavel, 21, and wounding a second in the thigh. He then fired at two more officers as they approached the house. Both of them, identified by the ministry as Cyrille Morel, 45, and Rémi Dupuis, 37, were killed.

Hundreds of cartridge casings were found on the ground after the standoff, Mr. Maillaud said. He described a confusing gun battle as flames from the growing fire hampered an elite police squad that had arrived equipped with night-vision goggles, part of a force of roughly 400 officers who were involved in a brief manhunt for Mr. Limol.

Mr. Limol at some point fled the scene in a car and appeared to have lost control of the vehicle about a mile away, crashing into a tree, Mr. Maillaud said. Officers found his body outside of the car, with a Glock handgun in one hand and an AR-15-style rifle equipped with a sound suppressor, a flashlight and a laser sight nearby.

“We are therefore dealing with someone who was extremely determined to cause a carnage, regardless of who was in front of him,” Mr. Maillaud said. An autopsy indicated that Mr. Limol, who also had four knives on his belt and was wearing a bulletproof vest, had killed himself.

The attack prompted swift condemnation. “To protect us, our forces risk their lives,” President Emmanuel Macron said of the officers on Twitter. “They are our heroes.”

The officers were members of France’s gendarmerie — the force that oversees smaller towns and rural and suburban areas. Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister, said that the officers died in “particularly despicable circumstances” after a “courageous and heroic” intervention.

“We owe them respect and gratitude,” Mr. Darmanin said, speaking to reporters in Ambert, a town near St.-Just, adding that the episode was one of the deadliest in the gendarmerie’s history.

French police officers have been repeatedly targeted by Islamist terrorist attacks in recent years, but deadly gun violence against police is otherwise rare in France.

Twenty-five French police officers and gendarmes were killed in the line of duty in 2018, up from 15 in 2017, according to official statistics. Thirteen of those deaths in 2018 were directly related to police operations. There have been 11 such deaths so far in 2020, including the officers killed on Wednesday, the interior minister said.

Marlène Schiappa, France’s junior minister for citizenship, told BFM TV that the shooting was proof that perpetrators of domestic violence were a danger to society.

“These are people who think they own their wife or partner,” Ms. Schiappa said, adding that such people “will use any means to maintain that possession,” including violence.

Mr. Maillaud, the prosecutor, said Mr. Limol had been in a contentious divorce with his ex-wife, involving a dispute over child care, but that the authorities had no prior records of domestic violence or threats against Sandrine S., who was hospitalized and still in shock on Wednesday evening and had not yet been questioned by police.

Mr. Macron has made tackling domestic abuse one of his government’s priorities, and awareness about violence against women has surged in recent years. In 2019, nearly 150 women in France were killed by their partner or former partner, a 21 percent increase from the previous year, according to official statistics.

The French Parliament recently approved a law that eased medical confidentiality restrictions in cases where there is an “immediate danger” of violence, enabling practitioners to flag cases to the legal authorities without a patient’s consent.

The law also increased prison terms for people convicted of harassing their partner and criminalized the geolocation of one’s partner without consent.