Teacher Hailed as Ordeal Ends at French School

A 30-year-old first-year teacher who refused to leave her nursery school class during 46 tense hours of being held hostage by a man with sticks of dynamite strapped to his waist was hailed as a national heroine Saturday after the ordeal ended with all the children safe and the hostage taker shot dead by police.

The schoolteacher, Laurence Dreyfus, herself the mother of a 20-month-old child, told the children that the armed stranger in their classroom was there to repair the school heating system. With calm professionalism that won effusive praise from French national leaders, she supervised the children in games and art projects and led them in song to distract them from the life-and-death drama taking place around them.

The man with the dynamite, who described himself in papers discovered at the scene as the “Human Bomb,” was identified by police as Eric Schmitt, 42, an Algerian-born Frenchman who once managed a computer company that later went bankrupt.

A heavyset man from the southern French city of Beziers, Schmitt was shot four times in the head by elite French police who entered the classroom on orders of Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. The police action, staged just after dawn Saturday, was described as a last-ditch effort to save the six children, all girls ages 3 and 4, who remained hostage inside the Commandant Charcot school in this affluent Paris suburb.

Officials had already provided the $18.5 million Schmitt had demanded as ransom for the children. But Pasqua said police specialists in hostage situations became worried when the hostage-taker lost interest in the money and began to appear suicidal.

Moving into the classroom while Schmitt was sleeping, the policemen assigned to the special RAID (Research, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion) unit first covered the children with mattresses and then shot Schmitt with silencer-equipped weapons when he awoke and appeared threatening.

“The peril was immense,” said Pasqua. “At certain times he showed signs of wishing to commit suicide. We were afraid that he would kill himself in the classroom.”

Pasqua said police discovered 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of dynamite, including 16 sticks of dynamite strapped to Schmitt’s waist, in the classroom. The dynamite was wired to a detonator in Schmitt’s hand.

“He was isolated, intelligent and crazy at the same time,” Pasqua said. Schmitt, whose computer company went bankrupt two years ago in Beziers, had already demonstrated his violent potential by bombing an underground parking garage in Neuilly on May 8 and leaving notes signed with the initials “H.B.”--for the English words “Human Bomb.”

Mainly because of the efforts of schoolteacher Dreyfus, who went into seclusion with her husband and child immediately after the hostage ordeal ended Saturday morning, officials said the children emerged from the volatile episode relatively unscathed.

“Believe it or not,” said Neuilly-sur-Seine Mayor Nicolas Sarkozy, who conducted negotiations with the hooded man, “the children are less traumatized than we are.”

After Schmitt was killed and the children released, Dreyfus alternated between laughter and tears, according to Education Minister Francois Bayrou, who went to the school to congratulate her.

Pasqua announced that Dreyfus and firewoman-pediatrician Evelyne Lambert, 26, who helped with the children and who defied Schmitt by refusing to give him stimulant drugs he requested to stay awake, will be awarded the nation’s top honor for heroism, the Legion d’Honneur.

Negotiations to release the children had stalled Friday evening. Schmitt refused to give up the dynamite in exchange for a gun if he left the school, Pasqua said. News reports said he balked at exchanging the children for adult hostages.

Police had already disguised several officers as parents of the children, hoping to win access to the classroom. At first, Schmitt appeared to agree to exchange the children for adult hostages but later backed off, becoming increasingly hostile and melancholy.

For more than two days in France, the hostage episode in the richest suburb of Paris became a national preoccupation. Pasqua reported that hundreds of French volunteered to be hostages in exchange for the children.

“My reaction is one of relief and joy,” said Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, whose moderate right-wing government has been in power for only six weeks. “For the past two days France has undergone a drama.”