Neither heroes nor heels are made in a day. Long before 10 a.m. Friday, March 23, when a four-hour drama involving a terrorist in a grocery store began, policeman Arnaud Beltrame knew the drill. 

A French police officer who swapped places with a civilian during Friday’s terror attack in southern France died from multiple knife wounds to his throat, an autopsy revealed. Morocco-born Radouane Lakdim, 25, killed four people after he hijacked a car in the town of Carcassonne and then held people hostage at a supermarket in Trèbes. In addition to slashing the officer’s throat with a knife, Lakdim also shot Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame in the head with a 7.65 mm pistol.

France on Sunday held a tribute Mass for a police officer who died after volunteering to take the place of a hostage in a terror attack that killed three others Friday. The attacker, identified as 25-year-old Morocco-born Radouane Lakdim, first killed the owner of a car he hijacked in the town of Carcassonne. He traded shots with riot police before taking hostages at a supermarket in Trèbes. Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame died after sustaining injuries when police officials ended the standoff in a shootout with Lakdim.

UPDATE: A French police officer who volunteered to take the place of one of the hostages in Friday’s terror attack at a supermarket in southern France has died from injuries suffered in the incident. Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame was among the first to respond to the attack. Once on the scene, he gave up his weapon and offered himself in exchange for a female hostage. When police stormed the Super-U in Trèbes, Beltrame was wounded. Three others died in the attack, and the gunman was also killed. Fifteen people were injured.

Boko Haram militants returned 104 of the schoolgirls kidnapped from Dapchi last month, Nigerian officials confirmed Thursday, making official the number previously claimed by parents. According to the survivors, five girls died from injuries they sustained in the mad scramble to escape the kidnappers during the attack on their school. Only one girl remains in captivity: 15-year-old Leah Sharibu, who refused to renounce her Christian faith in exchange for her freedom.

A suspected Islamic State (ISIS) suicide bomber set off an explosive Wednesday near a Shiite shrine in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing at least 29 people and injuring 52 others. The bombing took place as Afghans marked the Persian New Year. Nasrat Rahimi, deputy spokesman with Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry, confirmed the casualties and said the attacker was on foot when the bomb exploded. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in an online statement, according to the SITE Intelligence monitoring group.

Boko Haram extremists on Wednesday returned some of the 110 schoolgirls they kidnapped last month from Nigeria’s Yobe state, witnesses and government officials confirmed. The extremists in February stormed the boarding school in the town of Dapchi and abducted the girls. Umar Hassan, a Dapchi resident, said the town received reports Wednesday that the insurgents were heading their way, and many people fled for shelter. Hassan and another resident, Ba’ana Musa, said they saw some of the kidnapped girls exiting nine vehicles at about 2 a.m.