Pressure on ministers to explain how warnings were missed before deadly attack

This article is more than 11 months old

This article is more than 11 months old

Pressure is growing on France’s government to explain how the radicalisation of a man who killed four colleagues at the Paris police headquarters failed to raise red flags inside the intelligence unit where he worked.

The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, summoned before two parliamentary committees this week, conceded there had been a “malfunction” as he promised to “tighten the net”.

The minister came under fire after initially claiming that Mickaël Harpon, a 45-year-old computer expert employed in the intelligence unit at police headquarters in Paris, never gave the “slightest reason for alarm” before the rampage on Thursday.

Harpon had worked for the police since 2003.

Newspaper front pages on Monday described a “serious malfunction” in the intelligence community and “shortages” in the anti-terrorism machinery, as critics called for Castaner’s head.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mickaël Harpon. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images

Harpon used a kitchen knife and an oyster knife to kill three police officials and an administrative staffer – three men and a woman – and injure two others in a 30-minute lunchtime attack that ended when he was shot in the head.

It emerged he had converted to Islam 18 months ago, and had then been in contact with adherents of Salafism, an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam.

He had caused alarm among colleagues as far back as 2015 when he defended the massacre of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris by two brothers vowing allegiance to al-Qaida. No report was filed, however.

“There was no alert at the right level at the right time,” Castaner told France Inter radio on Monday. “The warning signals should have been sufficient to unlock a thorough investigation.”

He added: “I want for any warning sign to be automatically flagged.”

Castaner, who said on Sunday he would not resign over the matter, has been summoned to appear before parliament’s intelligence committee on Tuesday.

“We’re going to try to find out what these failings were,” the committee’s chairman, Christian Cambon, said on Sunday.

On Thursday, the minister will appear before a standing parliamentary committee responsible for oversight of the administration. It said in a statement on Monday that it would seek answers about “the conditions that allowed a criminal attack to take place within the police headquarters”.

Its inquiry would also focus on “the warning signs that could have alerted to his radicalisation in the workplace” and “more generally, on the measures taken by the government … regarding the detection of radicalised agents in the administration and measures taken to protect the public service against the risks posed by such agents”.

Investigators said Harpon’s personal life had been subject to an extensive background check early in his career, as he worked with classified information as part of the Paris police’s intelligence division. While he did not have a criminal record, he was given an official sanction in 2012 over a case of domestic violence three years earlier.

An investigation showed that Harpon began wearing traditional Islamic garments for mosque visits, and had started refusing “certain kinds of contact with women”.

Harpon’s 38-year-old wife was freed from police custody without charge on Sunday after several days of questioning.

Police found the couple had exchanged 33 text messages shortly before the attack, ending the conversation with “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest).

French police have often been targets of jihadist groups such as Islamic State since 2015, from large, coordinated assaults to isolated knife and gun attacks.