PARIS, France — A man who said he was ready to die for Allah was shot dead on Saturday after attacking a soldier at Paris’s Orly airport, triggering a major security alert that caused travel chaos. Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a 39-year-old French national, grabbed a female soldier and put a gun to her head, seizing her assault rifle, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins told a press conference. In any case people are going to die,” the attacker told the troops in Molins’s account of the attack. Incoming flights were diverted and thousands of passengers stranded at Paris’s second-largest airport, but normal service resumed by mid-afternoon. The soldiers on patrol at Orly airport belong to Operation Sentinelle, a force of 7,000 troops deployed in the capital and other cities after the January 2015 attacks in Paris.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer March 18, 2017 23:26 UTC