“He hasn’t explained” why he attached the head to the fence, or shouted out “Allahu Akbar”(God is greatest) as firefighters overpowered him as he attempted to open bottles of acetone in a warehouse at the factory, a source told reporters.
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The minister vowed to clamp down on mosques and preachers inciting hatred after a suspected Islamist beheaded his boss during an attack on a gas factory last week.
He then stopped by the roadside and decapitated Cornara in the back of his delivery van. “The decapitation recalls the habitual modus operandi of this terrorist organization”, Molins said.
Molins said the apparent attempt to blow up the factory resembled a suicide operation.
A lawyer for Salhi told BFM TV that Salhi was “in no way a militant”, a line of defence his client pursued during initial questioning but which Molins dismissed.
PARIS (AP) – The man who decapitated his employer and hung the severed head wrapped in Islamic flags took two photos of the macabre scene and sent them nearly immediately to a friend in Syria, a French prosecutor said Tuesday. He “was not identified as a risk”, said Cazeneuve following the attack. It revealed that he had said in a WhatsApp conversation on the day of the attack that he indeed knew Salhi and that he considered himself to be “one of the reasons” Salhi had carried out the crime. The friend apparently told relatives he planned to ask the Islamist militant organization for permission to disseminate the pictures, Molins said.
Paris prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said anti-terrorism investigators handed Yassin Salhi the preliminary charges Tuesday. Also last night France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius warned that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could explode “at any moment” and that Isil can interfere at any time.
The suspect claimed his motives were “purely personal and his act was not terrorist”, said Molins, adding that Salhi had blamed a fight with his employer as well as a dispute with his wife for pushing him to commit the crime.
“According to him his motive was only personal and not terrorist”. One of their work colleagues, quoted on the website of the television station i-Tele, also said the two men had clashed days earlier after Salhi dropped a pallet of fragile equipment.
French authorities say Salhi frequented Islamic radicals and was filed between 2006 and 2008 as being at risk of becoming radicalised, but he had a clean criminal record and didn’t show signs of preparing any attacks.
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On Sunday, Mr. Valls said that the world was engaged in a war against terrorism: “We can not lose this war because it’s fundamentally a war of civilization”.
