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.
“The man wants to talk to the press about his job problems,” said Dominique Dezecot, an official at the prefecture, the headquarters of the town authorities.
“We are hopeful (it will end well) but we are worried,” Bernadette Mercier, a school employee, told LCI television.
Officials initially put the number of hostages at 18 pupils and two adults, but later raised the number.
“All the day pupils have gone home,” Marie, a boarder at the school, told France Info radio shortly after the hostages were seized on Thursday afternoon.
“They took all the boarders out via the toilets by a door where they couldn’t see us. We went around the buildings to get to a door behind the gym and now everyone is in the gym. At the moment they are doing a roll call to see who is there and who isn’t there.”
The drama comes at a sensitive time for conservative Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is under pressure over an unpopular youth job creation plan.
Aides said Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was monitoring the situation during a visit to the French Antilles Islands but he announced no plans to cut short his trip.
Sarkozy was mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly when a man took children hostage at a local school in May 1993.
Sarkozy helped negotiate with the hostage-taker before crack police broke into a classroom, killed the man and freed the remaining hostages. The other hostages had been gradually released as a result of the negotiations.