A Frenchman once convicted of recruiting jihadi fighters stabbed a police commander to death outside his suburban Paris home, recording the attack and posting it on Facebook Live, French officials said Tuesday.
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The security official called it a routine matter as police and intelligence services seek to avert a repeat of deadly Islamic State attacks on France past year.
In the attack, the jihadist repeatedly stabbed 42-year-old police commissioner Jean-Baptiste Salvaing outside his home, and then barricaded himself inside the house with the man’s 36-year-old partner Jessica Schneider and the couple’s three-year-old son.
French President Francois Hollande threatened to ban demonstrations Wednesday, the day after protests in Paris over labor reforms that the government vowed to push through regardless of strong opposition.
At a news conference, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, offered new details about the brutal killings and an ensuing standoff that lasted almost four hours, ending when police stormed the house, mortally wounding the assailant.
Salvaing was a police commander in the Paris suburb of Les Mureaux; the administrator has not been identified. A state of emergency is still in place, and 90,000 security forces are now deployed to protect the European Championship soccer tournament taking place across France.
Abballa had been under wiretap surveillance since January as part of an investigation into a Syrian jihadi network.
Both people are said to be “linked” to Abballa, who was from the nearby suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie. He was put into provisional detention in 2011 for links to a Pakistani-Afghan extremist network, and was sentenced in 2013 to a three-year partially suspended imprisonment for association with terrorism, Molins said.
By the time the security forces reached the couple’s son three hours later, he was in a “stunned” state as people are after a profound shock, said Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister.
After warning officers that he would blow the house up if they moved in, Abballa was finally shot dead at midnight by members of an elite police unit.
A Facebook profile bearing the name Larossi Abballa – which vanished from the internet early Tuesday – showed a photo of a smiling, bearded young man. Two recent posts featured videos critical of Israel and Saudi Arabia. He also posted two messages on Twitter from an account he opened last Wednesday.
Cazeneuve said that since the start of 2016, more than a hundred people “representing a threat to public security” had been arrested.
But we’ve also seen it in Europe and other countries around the world.
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Police unions announced they had secured the right for officers to remain armed while off duty, which has until now been allowed only under the state of emergency declared after November’s Paris attacks.
