Convicted terrorist stabs commander to death outside home in Magnanville before taking partner and son hostage

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

President François Hollande has convened crisis talks after a man convicted for terrorist offences and claiming allegiance to the Islamic State stabbed a French police commander to death in front of his house outside Paris, then killed his partner who also worked for the police.



The 42-year-old police commander was in plain clothes when he was stabbed to death as he arrived home at around 8.30pm on Monday night in a quiet residential area of Magnanville, north-west of Paris.

The attacker then entered the house and held hostage the commander’s partner – who also worked in the local police administration – and the couple’s three-year-old son.

Hollande called it “incontestably a terrorist act” and said France was facing a terror threat “of a very large scale”.

Elite police squads rushed to the scene, sealed off the neighbourhood, cut electricity and negotiated with the attacker who told them he was a soldier for Isis and had sworn allegiance to the group.

Shortly afterwards loud detonations were heard as police stormed the house and killed the assailant. They found the woman dead and rescued the couple’s son alive.

The attacker was identified by Le Monde and RMC radio as Larossi Abballa, 25, who was known to police for radicalism and already had a terrorism conviction.



He 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 jihadists linked to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

French media reported Abballa had recently been under close police surveillance as he had featured in the entourage of another man who had left for Syria.

The French journalist and jihadhist expert David Thomson reported that Abballa had used Facebook live to post images of the attack — a video which is being examined by police. Thomson reported that while the attacker filmed himself, the three-year-old boy was behind him on the sofa. The attacker said: “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with him.”



The attacker lived alone in nearby Mantes-la-Jolie, where the woman worked in the local police station and where the police commander had previously worked before being posted to nearby Mureaux.

The police officer who died was named in the French media as Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, described as an assistant chief in the nearby district of Les Mureaux. He was reported to have been wearing civilian clothes at the time.



Magnanville is about 35 miles north-west of central Paris.



“The toll is a heavy one,” interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told reporters at the scene. “This commander, this police officer was killed by the individual … [and] we discovered the body of a woman. The assailant, the criminal, was killed. Thankfully a little boy was saved. He was in the house. He’s safe and sound. He was saved by police officers.”

Islamic State 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.”

A prosecutor said the three-year-old boy was “in shock but unharmed” and receiving medical attention.

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, tweeted that “a couple of police officers had been savagely assassinated”. He added: “Refuse fear, fight terrorism.”



The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, called it “an abject terrorist attack” and expressed his “infinite sadness” at the killings.

He said in a statement: “The attacker was neutralised by Raid forces, who showed great composure and great professionalism and who saved the couple’s little boy. The inquiry opened by the justice authorities will establish the precise circumstances of this tragedy.”

The killing in France 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.

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At the same time, France is hosting the Euro 2016 football tournament under tight security. The country is still reeling from the November 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.

Police officers were known to be potential target of jihadist terrorism in France, after two officers were killed in the attacks of January 2015. One officer, Ahmed Merabet, was shot dead by the French Kouachi brothers as they fled Charlie Hebdo magazine after opening fire on an editorial meeting.

Another 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.

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.

Just after the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks in January 2015, police raided a terror cell in Verviers in Belgium to foil an imminent attack in which prosecutors said jihadists aimed “to kill police officers on public roads and in police offices,”



The Verviers terror cell was part of a broader French-Belgian jihadist network with links to those involved in the later terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March.

But targeting police officers at their home, as happened in the Magnanville attack, would be a new type of 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 Joue-les-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 panel-beater 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.