The French government has denounced an “abject act of terrorism” after a man with a previous terrorist conviction carried out a gruesome knife murder of a police commander and his partner at their home outside Paris in the presence of their three-year-old son.
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, a police commander had returned to his home in the quiet residential area of Magnanville 50km (30 miles) west of Paris at 8:30pm on Monday night in plain clothes, when Larossi Abballa, a French man previously convicted of taking part in a jihadi recruitment network and claiming allegiance to Islamic State, lay in wait for him hidden behind a gate.
Salvaing first managed to escape and shouted at neighbours to call the police, but Abballa caught up with him on the pavement and repeatedly knifed him in the stomach, killing him.
Abballa, 25, then ran into the house and held hostage the commander’s 36-year-old partner, who worked as a police administrator in a police station in nearby Mantes-la-Jolie, as well as the couple’s three-year-old son.
Elite police squads were called to the scene, evacuated neighbours, sealed off the area and cut off electricity, plunging the street into darkness.
Police negotiators attempted to talk to Abballa, who said he was a soldier for Islamic State and had sworn allegiance to the group. He said that he had deliberately targeted police.
The negotiations failed and shortly before midnight loud explosions and shots were heard as police stormed the house and killed the attacker. They found the woman dead from a knife-wound to the neck, and rescued the couple’s son alive.
Abballa posted images of his assault live on Facebook, according to David Thomson, a French journalist specialising in French jihadism, who tweeted that the attacker filmed himself at the scene inside the house with the three-year-old boy behind him on the sofa. Abballa said, with the boy seated behind him: “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with him.”
Thomson reported that the Facebook account was deactivated and the video was being examined by police.
The three-year-old was carried from the scene by police after Abballa was killed by the elite squad. A prosecutor said the boy was “in shock but unharmed”.
The mayor of Magnanville, Michel Lebouc, visited Allée de Perdrix, where the double killer struck. He said the boy was being looked after by social services, adding that children at the boy’s school would be offered counselling.
“[The killer] was not at all known in Magnanville,” he said. “I understood he lived in Mantes-la-Jolie. He came to carry out an attack in Magnanville because he wanted to hit the state in its flesh, so he attacked two policemen who worked for for the nation.”
He said the woman had been dead before the police moved in. “The [police] assault took place this night. The mother of the small boy was already dead when the assault took place. The small boy has been evacuated to the care of social services in Paris.”
Allée de Perdrix was sealed off by French police on Tuesday. The property where the police officer was killed is in a pretty street of relatively modern and uniformly off-white with tile roof houses and bungalows, opposite a playing field with a white picket fence.
The police officers moved in two years ago and were well known locally. The woman who was killed was active at the local town hall.
Neighbour Monique Fohrer said she had first heard sirens at around 8.45pm on Monday. As the evening progressed, she said the scene was “like something out of a warzone”.
“It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Magnanville,” she said. “If it wasn’t so tragic, you’d have thought it was a scene in a film.”
Fohrer said after rapid response police arrived, locals heard gunfire some time before midnight.
“We guessed it was the police going in and they had shot the man inside. Then we heard the woman who was being held hostage had had her throat slit. We didn’t know at that point that it was a terrorist.”
She added: “All we can think of is the horror for that poor boy. It is unthinkable.”
Abballa, was French and lived in Mantes-La-Jolie. Salvaing had also worked in Mantes-la-Jolie before being appointed to a command post in Les Mureaux, a few kilometres away.
Abballa had been sentenced to three years in prison, six months suspended, in 2013 for “criminal association in view to preparing terrorist attacks” over his role in a recruitment network of jihadis to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Before his arrest in that case, aged 20, in 2011, he had been known to police for crime including theft and violence. He was released from prison in September 2013 after serving most of his sentence while he was on remand.
He was on a French monitoring list and is also reported to have been recently identified and monitored as part of the entourage of a French man who had recently left for Syria.
Abballa’s home in Mantes-la-Jolie was searched by police and two people were arrested in the inquiry. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said there were likely to be related arrests as investigators sought to stop any possible accomplices.
Isis appeared to claim the attack through its news agency. The Site Intelligence Group, a US-based monitor, cited the Isis-linked Amaq News Agency as saying on its Telegram channels shortly afer the attack: “Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife with blade weapons near Paris.”
If the attack is confirmed as being by Islamic State it would be the first jihadi attack in France since a state of emergency was declared when coordinated jihadi attacks on a stadium, bars and a rock-gig in Paris on 12 November last year killed 130 people.
The French president, François Hollande, who held crisis talks at the Elysée, said the double murder – which he had called “odious” – was “undeniably a terrorist attack”. He said France was facing a terror threat on “a very large scale”.
The attack took place as France hosts the Euro 2016 football tournamentunder tight security and a general terrorist threat.
The killing in France also came a day after a gunman claiming to be acting in the name of Isis shot dead 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in the worst mass shooting in US history.
Sameer al Fahham, who lives in Magnanville , said the neighbourhood was stunned. “Everyone around here is shocked. All we can think about is that poor child. We’ve had Paris and Orlsndo and now this. It’s time to say stop,” she said.
“Last evening the whole area was sealed off. There were police and gendarmes as well as the emergency services. They told us what had happened.
“Then, very late we heard two explosions and shooting. We were still here at 4am. It’s a small place. We never thought something like this could happen here,” she add.
Police officers have been known to be potential targets of jihadis in France – six police and military personnel have been killed in terrorist attacks in France in the last four years. But targeting an off-duty police staff at their home is a new type of attack.
Earlier this year, a decree allowed French police officers to carry their service weapons with them outside work hours during the state of emergency, which has been in place since November and is currently scheduled to last until the end of the Tour de France in July.
Three police officers were killed in the terrorist attacks in January 2015. One police protection officer was killed by the French brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi in their attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Another officer, Ahmed Merabet, was shot dead on the street by brothers as they fled. A third police officer, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, was shot in the street the following day by their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly before he later took hostages at a Paris kosher supermarket, killing four.
Just after the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks in January 2015, police raided a terror cell in Verviers, Belgium, to foil an imminent attack in which prosecutors said jihadis aimed “to kill police officers on public roads and in police offices”.
The Verviers terror cell was part of a broader French-Belgian jihadi network with links to those involved in the later terror attacks in Paris in November 2015.
Earlier this year, police shot dead a man who tried to enter a Paris police station brandishing a butcher’s knife and wearing a fake suicide vest on the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
In 2014, French police shot dead a knife-wielding man who attacked three officers in a police station while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. The man, known to police for petty crime, wounded one officer’s face at the entrance to the police station in Joué-lès-Tours near the central city of Tours and injured two others before he was killed. The investigation was led by anti-terror police.
In 2012, the radicalised 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, who went on to kill three schoolchildren and a rabbi outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, began his killing spree by targeting soldiers. He first killed an off-duty paratrooper who had arranged to meet someone about selling a motorbike, then killed two uniformed soldiers in Montauban, injuring a third. Days later, he targeted the Jewish school before being killed after a 32-hour siege at his flat.
I don’t know what the police are like in France, but if they’re anything like American pigs, they get zero sympathy from me.
At least the killer didn’t harm the child. These jihadis evidently have more conscience than the US government’s goons, many of whom have no problem killing children (Waco, etc.).
Paris is a war zone because the French are on the brink of revolution.
The Guardian is tying this to ISIS because that’s their job, and this story may have absolutely nothing to do with why the pig was killed.
We don’t know what happened to this cop, and we’re sure as hell not going to find out from the Guardian, but I guess it’s an interesting read if you like fiction.
“… prosecutors said jihadis aimed “to kill police officers on public roads and in police offices”.
Lousy ‘aim’, so far.