French Police Officer And Partner Murdered In ‘Odious Terrorist Attack’

Convicted terrorist Larossi Abballa fatally stabs Jean-Baptiste Salvaing before killing officer’s partner in attack claimed by Isis

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, had returned to his home in the quiet residential area of Magnanville 30 miles (50km) west of Paris between 8pm and 8.20pm on Monday night in plain clothes, when Larossi Abballa, a Frenchman 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 stabbed 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 the electricity, plunging the street into darkness.

Police negotiators attempted to talk to Abballa, who said he was a soldier for Isis and had sworn allegiance to the group. He said that he had deliberately targeted police.

The negotiations failed when Abballa first told police to stay away from the door then cut off communications. 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 but in a state of shock.

The French state prosecutor, François Molins, said that during the negotiations with police, Abballa had said he was a practising Muslim and observing Ramadan and that he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, three weeks ago. Abballa said he had responded to an Isis appeal to “kill non-believers at home with their families”. He said he had known that his target was a police officer.

After the raid, police found inside the house a target list including “rappers, journalists, police officers and public personalities”. They also found three phones and three knives including a bloody knife placed on the table-top. In Abballa’s car outside they found a Qur’an, a white djellaba garment and a book called “Authentic Belief”.

Molins said that at 8.52pm, Abballa had posted a 12-minute video on his Facebook page as well as two tweets in which he claimed responsibility for the attack.

In the video, which was seen by AFP, Abballa called on supporters to attack to attack police, journalists, public figures, prison guards and rappers and to “turn the Euro [football tournament] into a graveyard.” The video was later removed from Facebook.

David Thomson, a French journalist specialising in French jihadism, tweeted that the attacker had posted images of the attack and 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 had been deactivated and the video was being examined by police.

The mayor of Magnanville, Michel Lebouc, visited Allée de Perdrix, where the double killer struck. He said the three-year-old 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 tiled 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. 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 nearby Les Mureaux.

It emerged that just hours before the killing, Abballa had been seen in his local mosque reading the Qu’ran.

Rector Mohammed Droussi said Abballa had been so engrossed in his religious study after attending midday prayers that he had to ask him to leave as the prayer room was closing.

“He seemed very calm, very ordinary. He was praying here like everyone else. There was no sign that he was radicalised,” he said.

In 2013 Abballa had been sentenced to three years in prison, with six months suspended, 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. In prison, he had been flagged up for radical proselytising, the state prosecutor said. He had been followed up by probation officers since his release.

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.

The state prosecutor confirmed that he had been under police surveillance this year as part of a general investigation opened in February into another person’s departure for Syria. Several phone lines had been under surveillance in that inquiry but phone-tapping of Abballa’s line had not flagged up any element to suggest the preparation of a violent act, the prosecutor said.

Abballa’s home in Mantes-la-Jolie was searched by police and three men in his entourage were taken into police custody for questioning. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said there were likely to be related arrests as investigators sought to stop any possible accomplices.

Computer equipment was taken for examination from his home, but no weapons were found there.

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 tournament under 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.

Police officers have been targets of jihadis in France before – six police and military personnel have been killed in terrorist attacks in the last four years. But targeting an off-duty police staff at their home is new.

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.

(TheGuardian US )