Police shoot down man carrying piece of paper with Isis flag on it on first anniversary of Charlie Hebdo attacks

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

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.

The man was carrying a piece of paper marked with the Islamic State flag and an “unequivocal” claim of responsibility written in Arabic, the Paris prosecutor said. He was also carrying a mobile phone.

Investigators matched the man’s fingerprints with those of a homeless man convicted of theft in 2013, a source close to the investigation told the news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP). He identified himself at the time as Sallah Ali, born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1995.

A closeup of a knife at the scene. Photograph: Anna Polonyi/AFP/Getty

The Paris prosecutor François Molins told France Inter radio on Friday that the man was still being identified and it was too early to confirm his name.

The name, Sallah Ali, that he had given to police when he was arrested for robbery in the south of France 2013, might not be the correct name, he said. The piece of paper he was carrying with him when he was shot dead suggested a different name and that he could have been Tunisian rather than Moroccan.

Investigation sources told AFP that people claiming to be the man’s parents and cousin had, indeed, identified him from his photo as a Tunisian named Tarek Belgacem. But a source close to the investigation said it was still to early for any formal identification.

The note on the man’s paper said his threatened attack on the police station had a link to “deaths in Syria”. Investigators are examining the mobile phone which the man had been carrying and which had a German sim card.

The incident was being investigated as a terrorist “attempted murder” of public officials in authority, the prosecutor said.

The man was shot after approaching the police station in the Goutte d’Or area in the northern 18th arrondissement, between the Gare du Nord train station and the Sacre Coeur Cathedral, at 11.30am, one year almost to the minute after the attack on the satirical magazine, in which 12 people were killed.

The prosecutor said the man brandished a butcher’s knife and shouted: “Allah Akbar,” before police shot him.

Bomb disposal teams and anti-terrorism investigators were on the scene. The man was found to have been wearing a pouch under his coat with a wire hanging from it, but the device “contained no explosives”, a source told AFP.

The interior ministry told AFP that the man had attempted to attack an officer at the station reception.

Local residents said they heard four shots fired by police, who shut down the area and told people to close windows and stay away from balconies.

The man, who had acted without covering his appearance, was not carrying identifying papers.

Two schools on the Goutte d’Or, including a nursery closed as a precaution, with the children inside. Armed police sealed off neighbouring streets.

France remains in a state of emergency after the 13 November attacks in which gunmen and suicide bombers targeted Paris bars, the Bataclan concert hall and the national stadium and 130 people were killed.

The shooting of the man at the police station occurred just as President François Hollande was finishing a speech to security forces at the city’s main police headquarters to mark the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings.

He hinted at intelligence failings that might have allowed the Charlie Hebdo attacks to take place as he called for all branches of the security services to cooperate more closely.

“Faced with these adversaries, it is essential that every service – police, gendarmerie, intelligence, military – work in perfect harmony, with the greatest transparency, and that they share all the information at their disposal,” he said.

Many of the attackers in the January assault on Charlie Hebdo and a Paris kosher supermarket as well as in the massacres in November were known to French security services. Several had either travelled abroad to fight with extremists or had been prevented from doing so.

Hollande said that the three police killed in January’s attacks alongside some of the country’s most famous satirical cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, “died so that we could live in freedom”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hollande warns of ongoing threat one year after Charlie Hebdo attack.

The French brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices, including a police protection officer and another police officer on the pavement outside.

The next day, a female police officer was killed by their accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, in Montrouge, southern Paris. On 9 January, Coulibaly went on to kill four people in a bloody hostage-taking at a kosher grocery shop in Paris.

Hollande said that since the attack on Charlie Hebdo, nearly 200 people in France had been placed under travel restrictions to prevent them joining Isis in Syria or Iraq.



In the wake of the November attacks, Hollande has taken a hard line on security issues. The government intends to give more powers to police, including increased rights to carry weapons, more powers to stop and search people and to search homes without oversight by judges. Some magistrates have complained that the measures transfer too much power from the judicial investigations process to the police.

The president also promised to boost the numbers of police and gendarmes by 5,000 this year.



