Intruder with imitation gun arrested after nursery school hostage drama

A MAN armed with a fake gun briefly took an adult hostage at a nursery school south of Paris yesterday.

The intruder, who entered the school in Vitry-sur-Seine on the southern edge of the city shortly before it opened, was caught trying to escape police after freeing the hostage, a judicial source said. He said the man appeared to have psychological problems, but had no police record.

He was armed with a imitation automatic weapon that could fire only gas cartridges, the source said.

“At 12:10pm the hostage-taker was taken out [of the building] calmly, without any shots fired,” Ludovic Monier, a policeman at the scene earlier told reporters.

Last month, a 26-year-old man with a record of psychological problems was shot and arrested in Toulouse after taking several hostages at a bank and saying he was a member of al-Qaeda.

Toulouse, in south-west France, was also where an al-
Qaeda-inspired gunman, Mohamed Merah, 23, was shot dead by police after killing three soldiers, three Jewish children at a school, and a rabbi.