French Court Seizure Ends; Hostages Freed

PARIS —  Three gunmen who seized a courtroom in Nantes, took 35 hostages and then sought unsuccessfully to fly to freedom released their last prisoners and surrendered peacefully to French police late Friday.

“The three men surrendered together when suddenly they realized they were at a dead end,” Police Commissioner Robert Broussard announced at the Chateau-Bougon airport, where the gunmen surrendered after French authorities refused to let them board a jet sitting on the tarmac.

Broussard, often called France’s “top cop” and the creator of a special anti-terrorist unit, negotiated the surrender. He and his chief aide, Ange Mancini, spent five hours talking with the gunmen huddled with four hostages--all judges--in the car in which they had been allowed to drive to the airport.

Their surrender came several hours after the most frightening and dramatic episode in the two-day siege.

Late Friday afternoon, the trio shot their way out of the courthouse, holding the four judges in chains. Their leader, Georges Courtois, a talkative, mustachioed criminal who has spent more than half his life in jail, pulled court President Dominique Bailhache by handcuffs attached to his right wrist and brandished revolvers in both hands.

Courtois, 34, looked nervously around him and then fired eight times at the police officers and journalists watching the scene, witnesses said. The spectators dropped to the ground. No one was injured, but a bullet shattered the lens of a camera belonging to the British Broadcasting Corp.

Courtois’ two accomplices followed him out of the courthouse, one handcuffed to two hostages, the other to a single hostage.

The three gunmen and four hostages entered a beige Renault mini-van supplied by the police and, after some maneuvering through the town of Nantes, a port city 200 miles southwest of Paris near the mouth of the Loire River, parked on the runway of the Nantes airport. Nearby stood a Mystere 20 jet plane that had brought Broussard to Nantes on Thursday, when the drama began.

Possible Destinations

The mini-van had been followed on its circuitous route to the airport by police cars and motorcycles.

The gunmen soon released two hostages but kept Bailhache, 45, and Assistant Judge Bernard Bureau, while insisting to the police that they wanted to be flown out of the country. Switzerland and Morocco were mentioned as possible destinations. But French officials told the gunmen they could not leave without giving up the hostages first.

Intense negotiations followed between police officers and the gunmen. National television showed police officers at times flanking the car, talking to the gunmen inside.

In the end, according to police, the gunmen surrendered unconditionally. Journalists could see them, handcuffed and under guard, as they were taken away in a police van.

Assistant Judge Bureau, one of the last hostages, said that he had been extremely frightened during the ordeal. “The most difficult moment was when we came out of the courthouse,” he said.

‘Honor Was Saved’

“All they wanted to do was to get away,” Bureau said of his captors. “That aspect of the operation failed, but they had the impression that they had carried out an exploit in escaping from the Nantes courthouse. For them, honor was saved.”

The hostage-taking had some political overtones, however. Abdel Karim Khalki, 30, a Moroccan citizen who shot his way into the courtroom Thursday where the other two gunmen were on trial for armed robbery and passing forged checks, insisted that he was a follower of Abu Nidal and the extreme Revolutionary Council of Fatah, a Palestinian group that has claimed credit for numerous terrorist acts.

Courtois, in a tirade before a television camera, had described himself as a convert to Khalki’s cause. To bolster this, Courtois made a show of looking for Jews among his hostages.

But police discounted all this as overdramatizing. In their view, Courtois and the other accused, Patrick Thiolet, 24, wanted to escape and persuaded the Moroccan to help them. Thiolet has not been out of prison for longer than two months since he was 17.

The police had given “a certain number of guarantees” to the gunmen, Mancini said, but he declined to elaborate.

Expulsion a Possibility

Broussard said that Khalki’s expulsion to his native Morocco was a possibility. Jean Chevance, prefect of the region of which Nantes is the main city, asked what guarantees had been given the gunmen, replied tersely, “Life.”

From the police car, Courtois himself said he had surrendered because he wanted to save the life of Khalki, a convicted holdup man. “He put his life and freedom at stake in the courtroom, and we believe today we should exchange ours for his,” Courtois said. “This has been guaranteed to us by the Interior Minister (Pierre Joxe),” Courtois said.

The crisis began at 10:30 a.m. Thursday when Khalki, carrying a revolver and hand grenades, entered the courtroom and fired into the air. He ordered the five police officers in the courtroom to give up their arms, mostly .357 magnum revolvers.

Courtois and Thiolet, who were on trial with two others, leaped out of the prisoners’ dock and divided the weapons with Khalki. Courtois told Judge Bailhache: “We came here to be judged. Now it is your turn to be judged.”

They took 35 hostages, including judges, police officers, jurors, law students and witnesses, but freed 21 Thursday and more Friday.

Throughout the 30 hours that they controlled the courtroom, the gunmen were in telephone contact with Broussard. He later said that the three had tried to slip out of the courthouse before dawn Friday but retreated when they found themselves “in the dark in the large entry lobby” with policemen waiting.

The negotiated surrender without bloodshed will enhance the reputation of Broussard, 49, who until a few months ago was in charge of putting down terrorist activity by separatists on the French island of Corsica. He has since created a new national, anti-terrorist squad known as RAID, an acronym for the Research Brigade of Action, Intervention, and Dissuasion.