A French police chief was fatally stabbed in front of his home in a Paris suburb late on Monday and a woman was found dead inside, killings the Islamic State’s Amaq news agency said were carried out by the militant group.
The unidentified attacker killed the 42-year-old commander before barricading himself inside the officer’s house. He was shot dead by members of an elite police unit after negotiations failed. The body of the woman was found inside.
Interior ministry officials were not immediately available for comment, while a judicial source said the anti-terrorism unit of the prosecutor’s office had been handed the investigation.
“Source to Amaq agency: Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife,” Amaq said on its news website.
If it is confirmed Islamic State was behind the murders, it would be the first militant strike on French soil since the government imposed a state of emergency after the multiple attacks on Paris in November that killed 130 people.
The killings took place in the Paris suburb of Magnanville, about 50 km (30 miles) northwest of the French capital and about 20 km (12 miles) from Les Mureaux where the police commander was stationed.
A three-year-old boy was rescued unharmed when commandos from the RAID police unit stormed the house.
Officials did not immediately reveal the identity of the 42-year-old officer or the woman, who prosecutor Vincent Lesclous said was “most probably the wife”.
“We have no certainty about the attacker’s motivations,” Lesclous said.
President Francois Hollande will hold a meeting at 7.45 a.m. (0545 GMT), his office said before the statement by Amaq was posted.
A Muslim radical with known terror ties stabbed a French police chief to death outside his home, then tortured the man’s wife in front of their toddler son – all while livestreaming his rampage on Facebook.
The shocking attack in Magnanville, 35 miles north of Paris, ended after a three-hour standoff, when French commandoes stormed the home, rescuing the boy and killing Larossi Abballa, 25. Before the raid, Abballa, a French national with a prior terrorism conviction and ties to jihadists based in Pakistan, made a horrific appeal to his Facebook followers, writing, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the boy.”
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, suffered fatal wounds outside of his home shortly after 8.30pm on Monday. His wife, also a police department employee, was killed inside the home in what the French interior minister called “an abject terrorist act.”
Word that Abbala had filmed the attack and posted it on Facebook Live shocked the nation Tuesday morning.
“The toll is a heavy one,” Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told reporters at the scene, his voice heavy with emotion.
Abbala, from the western Paris suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie, was sentenced in 2013 to three years in prison, including six months suspended, for association with a terrorist enterprise.
The Islamic State’s Amaq news agency cited an unnamed “source” as saying an ISIS fighter carried out the attack, but the extremist jihadist group has not officially claimed responsibility.
French media, some of them citing unnamed neighbors, reported that the attacker was heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is Great” — during the attack.
Speaking after an emergency meeting convened Tuesday morning by French President Francois Hollande, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said more than 100 people seen as potential threats have been arrested in France this year, including in recent weeks.
Cazeneuve also warned that the threat of terrorism “is high in France, it’s high in Europe, it’s high in the Western world as shown by the events that happened 48 hours ago in the United States,” a reference to the attack on an Orlando night club early Sunday.
Hollande himself said Monday’s murders were “incontestably a terrorist act and warned that France was facing a terror threat “of a very large scale.”
France, like other countries in Europe, has seen a series of stabbings aimed at police officers or soldiers and carried out by Muslim radicals. ISIS has encouraged its supporters to stage such attacks.
“Today every police officer is a target,” Yves Lefebvre of police union Unite SGP Police-FO told The Associated Press, adding that attackers are “professionalizing” and can now find police in their homes.
Cazeneuve said Tuesday that police officers would now be allowed to take their service weapons home.
France has been under a state of emergency since a series of co-ordinated shootings and bombings by ISIS terrorists killed 130 people in Paris this past November. The country is currently hosting the European soccer championship, and stadiums and other public places are under tight security.
There was no indication that the murders would affect either of the two matches scheduled to take place Tuesday.
The jihadist killing of two police officials outside Paris is the latest targeted attack by an individual responding to Islamic State (ISIS or IS) terror group propaganda, terrorism experts say.
In a video of Monday’s attack reportedly live-streamed on Facebook, 25-year-old Larossi Abballa referenced Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, an ISIS spokesman dubbed the group’s “attacks minister” by Western intelligence.
In an audio message released on May 21, Adnani called for attacks on Europe and the United States during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on June 6.
He also made a similar appeal at the same time last year, urging supporters to seek “martyrdom.”
“Today we are seeing the return of targeted attacks… by individuals who have pledged allegiance to IS and act as outside agents,” said terrorism expert Mathieu Guidere.
While the jihadist rampage that killed 130 ordinary Parisians in November was “indiscriminate”, Abballa deliberately targeted police.
And a weekend bloodbath which killed 49 at a Florida nightclub – also carried out by an ISIS-inspired attacker – targeted the gay community, Guidere told France Inter radio.
‘Kill police, journalists, rappers’
The fact that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack so soon afterwards reflects a well-honed strategy of “asking the individual to provide proof that he has carried out the act,” said Guidere, a professor at the University of Paris.
“We are facing individuals who are serving as active external forces,” he said.
In his Facebook video, Abballa urged Muslims to kill “police, journalists, public figures, prison guards and rappers,” listing around a dozen well-known figures by name, according to David Thomson, a terrorism expert for French radio RFI who watched the video before it was taken down.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins confirmed Abballa had a “hit list” of names of VIPs, police and rappers.
In September 2014, Adnani released an audio track now accessible on thousands of jihadist websites in which he urged supporters to attack “the tyrants’ soldiers, their police and security forces, their intelligence (forces) and collaborators.”
“If you are able to kill an American or European infidel – particularly any of the hostile, impure Frenchmen… kill him by any way or means.”
Al-Adnani has become a key ISIS figure, seen as both a motivator and supervisor of terror attacks in the West.
A Syrian from the northern Idlib region, he is a veteran of anti-American jihad in Iraq going back to the US-led invasion in 2003.
‘Their blood is permitted’
Adnani urged jihadists to use whatever weapon comes to hand – in Abballa’s case, a knife.
“If you cannot (detonate) a bomb or (fire) a bullet, arrange to meet alone with a French or an American infidel and bash his skull in with a rock, slaughter him with a knife, run him over with your car, throw him off a cliff, strangle him, or inject him with poison,” he says.
Al-Adnani says there is no need to “consult anyone” as all unbelievers are fair game: “It is immaterial if the infidel is a combatant or a civilian… They are both enemies. The blood of both is permitted.”
French soldiers have been repeatedly targeted by jihadists largely acting on their own since March 2012 when Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah killed three soldiers and three Jewish children and their teacher in the southwestern city of Toulouse.
In December 2014, a young man armed with a knife attacked three police officers in the central town of Joue-les-Tours while shouting “Allahu Akbar” – Arabic for “God is greatest”.
The following month, three police officers were among the 17 people killed during a wave of attacks in and around Paris that included the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
A year later, on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack, a young Tunisian armed with a butcher’s knife and wearing a fake suicide vest tried to attack a Paris police station but was gunned down.