A prisoner who had escaped from a French prison in a helicopter with the help of an armed gang was arrested by police after a three-month hunt.
Rédoine Faïd was dubbed the "jailbreak king" after his escape from a high-security prison in July.
He was serving a 25-year sentence for a robbery in which a policewoman was killed.
Faïd was arrested this morning at an apartment in Creil, the area where he grew up, an hour's drive north of Paris.
About 50 officers, some of them elite troops, took part in the pre-dawn raid, in which they also arrested Faïd's brother, two other men and a woman, police sources said. Guns were also found at the premises, they added.
The 46-year-old gained notoriety after writing a book about his life, describing how he was born into crime in the type of high-rise housing blocks that appeared around Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.
The book came out in 2010, shortly after his release from jail for a previous conviction.
Within months he was arrested again over an attack on a cash-transport truck that led to the death of a young policewoman.
He subsequently took four prison wardens hostage and used dynamite to escape a jail in northern France in 2013.
He spent six weeks on the run before he was recaptured.
The latest jailbreak, in which armed men with power saws landed in an open-air prison courtyard to free him from an adjacent visitor room before flying out in a hijacked helicopter, prompted a political debate over security in France, where wardens went on strike last year over safety standards.
