NANTES, France (Reuters) – An unemployed teacher armed with a gun took 20 pupils and three adults hostage at a school in western France on Thursday, demanding to talk to the media about his job problems, local officials said.Police surrounded the secondary school in the town of Sable-sur-Sarthe where the 33-year-old man barricaded the pupils aged 17 to 18, a teacher and two other adults into a classroom.
The hostage-taker was a supply teacher who had worked at the Colbert de Torcy school but had been unable to find a job for the past two years, the town authorities said.
Other pupils were evacuated and a telephone hotline was set up for anxious parents in Sable-sur-Sarthe, 220 km southwest of Paris and 100 km east of the city of Nantes.

Special forces trained in negotiations with hostage-takers were on their way to the scene.

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