This is the front page of the French magazine Le Figaro:
That's right - a Dubya-style "mission accomplished". It took these folks 32 hours to get a single guy. And they got at least three colleagues shot in the process...
Even the excuse "we were told to get him alive" is not credible. There are plenty of "special technology weapons" which can be used to catch an armed terrorist which, in this case, was made even easier by the fact that he had no hostages and that the entire building was evacuated. As a Russian anti-terrorist officer commented in the newspaper Rossiiskaia Gazeta, the use of special weapons such as "flash-bang" grenades and paralyzing gas should have made this a 3min operation, not a 32 hours one.
The French special police forces (RAID, GIPN, GIGN) have a very good reputation and some of their success were spectacular (remember the successful storming of the Air France Flight 8969 in 1994?). I have no idea what went so wrong this time, but the kind of jingoistic flag-waving nonsense printed by Le Figaro is really only an embarrassment for the French police.
