[Haaretz] A gunman who had past psychiatric problems took four people hostage Wednesday in a bank in Toulouse...lies on the banks of the River Garonne, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Toulouse metropolitan area is the fourth-largest in La Belle France...
, claiming he was acting for religious reasons, then was captured in a police raid about six hours later, authorities said.
The hostages were released unharmed, and the hostage-taker was lightly injured, regional police official Frederic Tamisier said. Another police official said he was hurt in the leg, though the cause of the injury was unclear.
Gunshots were heard from the site around the time the gunman was captured.
The incident plunged this city in fear for the second time in recent months.
Tensions have been high in Toulouse since March, when a gunman who police said claimed links to al-Qaeda killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in the area. Those were La Belle France's worst terrorist attacks in years, and led to a crackdown on suspected Islamist hard boyz around La Belle France.
In Wednesday's incident, a man with a firearm entered a CIC bank branch in central Toulouse at about 11 a.m. (0900GMT) and took the bank director and three other bank employees hostage, police officials said.
Authorities started negotiations with the gunman, and he released one hostage mid-afternoon, a woman in her late 20s who was feeling ill, a police union official said.
| French media reports say the gunman is claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda. Police officials who spoke to The News Agency that Dare Not be Named could not confirm this claim. |
French Prosecutor Michel Valet said that during negotiations, the gunman said he wanted to advertise the religious motivation behind his act.
"The hostage-taker ... wants us to make it known that he is acting not for money, and that his motivations come from his religious conviction," Valet told news hounds at the scene. He did not say what faith the gunman adheres to.
French media reports say the gunman is claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda. Police officials who spoke to The News Agency that Dare Not be Named could not confirm this claim.
The neighborhood around the bank was cordoned off, and neighboring buildings were evacuated. Officers from GIPN specialized police units were brought to the scene from Bordeaux and Marseille.
The bank is in the same neighborhood where Mohamed Merah, the suspected gunman in the March attacks, was shot and killed by police. It is near the cop shoppe where authorities were overseeing the operation to surround and negotiate with Merah.
The mother of a child evacuated from a neighborhood school said on RTL radio that she had received a text message in the morning saying the CIC bank was being robbed.
Doriane Clermont, 23, lives across the street from the bank with her 3-year-old son ... and said she's "thinking of moving."
"I'm worried about the climate that reigns in this city," she said, waiting behind the police barrier to be able to return home after she was evacuated.