A gunman claiming to be with ISIS held hostages in a supermarket in Trèbes, southwestern France on Friday morning, killing at least three people.
French interior minister Gérard Collomb said on Twitter Friday that police had killed the attacker.
“Everything leads us to believe that it is indeed a terror attack which is, as I said, still ongoing. The police…intervened in a very coordinated manner,” said President Emannuel Macron at a news conference in Brussels, where he was taking part in a European Union leaders’ summit.
The attacker allegedly began by firing on plainclothes police officers returning from a jog near the city of Carcassonne, injuring one officer. He is then believed to have proceeded to the supermarket in Trèbes. It is unclear how many hostages he took in the ensuing three-hour standoff.
Rumors swirled that the gunman asked for France’s release of imprisoned Salah Abdeslam, the only ISIS member left alive of the group that killed 130 in a series of coordinated attacks on Paris in November of 2015.
France remains on high alert from those attacks and a number of others that have hit the country in the past few years. Authorities say they frequently prevent plots, many of them targeting law enforcement, from coming to fruition.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened a terrorism investigation into Friday’s attack.