A French police officer lays flowers while paying tribute to colleagues killed in a knife attack near their home in Magnanville, west of Paris, on Tuesday. (Photo: AP)
A French police officer lays flowers while paying tribute to colleagues killed in a knife attack near their home in Magnanville, west of Paris, on Tuesday. (Photo: AP)
A suspected Islamist attacker stabbed a French police commander to death outside his home and later killed his companion in an attack claimed by ISIS and denounced by the government as “an abject act of terrorism”.
The assailant, a 25-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin, was jailed in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan and had been under security service surveillance, including wiretaps, at the time of the attack, police sources said.
The attacker filmed part of the assault live on the social network Facebook, according to David Thomson, a journalist specialised in radical Islamists.
In his Facebook message, he linked the attack to the Euro 2016 soccer tournament now under way in France, saying: “The Euros will be a graveyard.”
The attacker, named by the police and justice sources as Larossi Abballa, knifed the 42-year-old commander repeatedly in the stomach on Monday evening. He then barricaded himself inside the house in Magnanville, a suburb some 60 km west of Paris, taking the man’s 36-year-old partner and their three-year-old son hostage.
The police commandos shot Abballa dead when they stormed the house after negotiations failed but they found the woman, a secretary at a police station in a nearby suburb, killed with a knife, a source close to the investigation said. The boy was unharmed but in a state of shock.
“An abject act of terrorism was carried out yesterday in Magnanville,” interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after an emergency government meeting, before visiting Les Mureaux, where the police commander worked.
The police searched Abballa’s home and other locations on Tuesday and detained two people close to him for questioning, a police source said.
The killings came as France, which has been under a state of emergency since ISIS gunmen and bombers killed 130 people in Paris in 2015, was on high security alert for the Euro 2016, which began last Friday.
ISIS claimed the attack. “God has enabled one of the caliphate’s soldiers in city of Les Mureaux near Paris to stab to death the deputy police chief and his wife,” an official broadcast on its Albayan Radio said.
