Whereas guns continue to speak in the Middle EastFrance mourns one in every of its troopers. Staff Sergeant Florian Montorio was killed in Lebanon on Saturday. Confirming the unhappy information, Emmanuel Macron accused Hezbollah of being behind this assault which additionally left three individuals injured.
Florian Montorio joined the military in 2007 on the age of 21. He had participated in “a big quantity” of exterior operations, in keeping with the commander of the seventeenth Parachute Regiment of Montauban to which the non-commissioned officer was a member.
Missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali
This father of two daughters, born in Montauban and aged 40 on the time of his dying, “was profoundly beneficiant and profoundly brave. For instance, he took care of one in every of his wounded comrades in fight in Afghanistan, in significantly perilous circumstances,” defined Colonel Jérémy Akil.
Based on the web site of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, Florian Montorio notably served earlier than Lebanon in Senegal (2008 and 2009), Afghanistan (2010), New Caledonia (2012), Ivory Coast (2013), Mali (2017), Iraq (2017), Niger (2022) and Guyana (2024). “Volunteer for the airborne troops”, he joined the seventeenth Parachute Engineering Regiment (RGP) of Montauban in 2021.
A tribute within the coming days
The deceased non-commissioned officer was “on the finish of his navy profession and inside a couple of months, he was anticipated to return to civilian life,” added Colonel Akil. “We can pay tribute to him within the coming days, throughout a ceremony whose preparations are at present being studied.”
For the mayor of Valence d’Agen, in Tarn-et-Garonne, Jean-Michel Baylet, the dying of this soldier from his city constitutes “a tragedy”. “The Montorio household may be very well-known in Valence d’Agen. There are additionally a number of branches. They’re good individuals from our space and we’re sad,” he mentioned.
For his half, the president of the Brulhois Rugby Membership, primarily based in Dunes, close to Valence d’Agen, the place Florian Montorio performed for years, remembered “a really nice man, all the time smiling, all the time prepared for something, monumental kindness”.
The mayor of Montauban, Didier Lallemand, for his half expressed “immense unhappiness and immense sorrow as a result of as soon as once more the seventeenth RGP is paying a heavy worth in its missions”. He in reality recalled that “it’s a regiment which had already suffered on the time of Mohammed Merah”, who, earlier than killing a instructor and three youngsters from a Jewish college in Toulouse on March 19, 2012, had murdered three troopers between March 11 and 15 of the identical 12 months, together with two from this Montalbanese regiment.
