Here is a story that may interest you. My family told me about it when I met them for Christmas. I didn't know of this event because I wasn't born yet but my parents and grandparents still remember about it so I think people were really shocked.
This is a Google translation of a French article summarizing the events. I improved it to make it more pleasant to read and to correct the mistakes and I added information and extracts from some English articles so please forget the rather French and fragmented style, I was too lazy to re-write it entirely. I am trying to find good articles in English for you but for now you have the basics of the event here:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Erick Schmitt, the hostage taker
On May 13, 1993 at 9:25,
Erick Schmitt - whose name remained unknown until after the denouement - broke into a class on the ground floor of a nursery school in Neuilly, where 21 children of three and four years had started class with their teacher, Laurence Dreyfus.
The man, who was wearing gloves and was masked with a hood, presented himself as "HB" (for "Human Bomb" [I didn't translate his name, it was really Human Bomb in English, even in French.), brandished a revolver and, as he had meticulously planned, set an explosive system in the class with sticks of dynamite similar to those that he was wearing around his waist. He kept the detonator during the whole crisis. Schmitt's explosives were placed around the classroom, she said, making it difficult to walk around without touching the wires leading to his detonator.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]He made his claims known by written messages: 100 million francs (15.2 million euros) and a car to flee. The Raid prepared itself, set its microphones, cameras and psychologists came.
Charles Pasqua, the Minister of the Interior, gave the madman, at his request, his ID to show that authorities cared about the event. Nicolas Sarkozy, the Budget Minister and deputy mayor of Neuilly [he would later become president], played the role of a mediator.
Each time a wish by the hostage taker was fulfilled (television, food, money, meeting with parents and then with a journalist) one or more children was freed. Schmitt, who had surprised the police by his calm in the early hours of the incident, became more and more nervous as time went on, police said. He asked repeatedly for black coffee to help him to stay awake. Authorities agreed but sleeping pills were put in his coffee.
At the end of the first day, while the whole French people was watching the event, six little girls were still in the room with their teacher who wanted to stay with her students.
As the remaining six of the original 21 children in the class played on throughout the last day, a little boy who had been freed said Mrs Dreyfus had explained that the gunman was armed 'to kill the wolf'.
Constantly turning the ordeal into a game, she was at times aided by the hooded Schmitt himself, who, according to Evelyne Lambert, a paediatrician who was allowed into the classroom on Friday to help, told the children to call him 'the bandit', and encouraged their games.
Allowed to leave the classroom from time to time, Mrs. Dreyfus was able to meet the parents of the hostages and reassure them that their children were well.
Schmitt showed extraordinary and cruel determination, combined with a perverse compassion. He allowed a camera to be installed so that the parents could watch their children on closed-circuit television, after he had threatened in a letter to bleed them to death.
During the two days, the police surrounding the school had unusual access to the gunman, who at one point agreed to meet psychiatrists for 30 minutes, enabling them to draw up a portrait of a man who signed his letters 'H B' - which, he explained, stood for 'human bomb'. He said he preferred to die rather than be taken alive.
On Saturday at 05:30, Charles Pasqua launched an intervention by the Raid as HB, who had remained awake for two nights, had fallen asleep, still holding the detonator while the children hid under mattresses at the request of the teacher, so that they would not see the violent intervention of the Raid.
At 7:25, after 46 hours of hostage crisis the Raid burst into the classroom, shot the hostage taker three times in the head and saved the children and their teacher. Mrs Dreyfus was praised for her 'exceptional courage'.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]The Human Bomb was later identified as 42-year-old Eric Schmitt, an Algerian-born French citizen and a loner. His computer business had been made bankrupt two years before and 18 months later he was made redundant from an electrical firm.
He had no previous convictions apart from two for speeding and drink-driving. He had spent seven years in the army where he had learned to handle firearms.
He had already demonstrated this by exploding a small bomb in an underground car park in Neuilly the weekend before. In a letter to a newspaper, signed 'H B', he said that a minor incident would be followed by an event which would 'mobilise the media'.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]After the event, there was controversy regarding the death of the hostage taker. Some people said he shouldn't have been killed as he was asleep. I heard some people say that he was starting to wake up but I am not really sure.
Subject: Human Bomb - 1993 hostage taking in a nursery school in France 
Sun Jan 06, 2019 1:32 pm