VIDEO – Policewoman attacked: barricaded for hours, the inhabitants of La Chapelle-sur-Erdre tell their anguish

A man armed with a knife attacked a municipal policewoman this Friday morning in the town of La Chapelle-sur-Erdre (Loire-Atlantique). While she was urgently hospitalized, the police deployed a major security device to find the fugitive. This hunt plunged the small town into anguish for hours.

The schools immediately closed their doors. The goal ? Protect children by confining them indoors. The toddlers lay on the ground for the duration of the operation. “We said to each other ‘we must hold the children’“, relates Isabelle, a catechism teacher at the Saint-Michel school in La Chapelle-sur-Erdre, in the TF1 report at the top of the article. “As adults, you have to stay calm so as not to distress them. They thought it was an exercise.”

At the same time, the school management alerts parents of the situation by message. Difficult for the latter to keep their cool. “I listened to the news all the time, on television, on the radio, to follow what was happening”, relates a father, now relieved. As soon as the seal has been lifted, “I took the car straight away, I couldn’t wait any longer”, confides a mother, happy to have been able to pick up her little girl in front of the school gates.

Traders, too, took a cold sweat at lunchtime. “We were afraid”, testifies a restaurant owner whose terrace was emptied in a few minutes. “All the policemen were at the market and said ‘quick, quick, go home. There is someone armed running in La Chapelle. ‘ So we had to close our businesses “.

Forced to act blindly and in haste, some bosses have locked customers in their shop “because it was difficult to determine where he was exactly”, explains one of them. “It was scary.”

Local residents are still struggling to realize that the run has ended before their eyes. “There were shots fired several times”, remembers a man with a trembling voice. “But then we immediately saw the fire engine go out.”

After three hours on the run, the man was finally arrested. Two gendarmes were wounded in the hand and in the arm during his arrest. A third was in shock. Also injured during the engagement with the police, the suspect finally succumbed to his injuries.

For the moment, the motivations of the forties remain unknown, but according to a source close to the file, he presents “a hybrid profile, radicalized and very heavy psychiatric patient”. On the spot, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin also affirmed that the attacker was “diagnosed as severe schizophrenic”.