A police raid in the Paris suburb commune of Magnanville has ended with the death of a hostage taker, who fatally stabbed a police officer near his house and then killed his partner. Reports claim the man was shouting Islamist slogans during the attack.
RAID special forces raided the premises and shot the stabber dead, Francetv info has reported, citing a French Interior Ministry spokesman. The officers discovered the body of a woman in the house and rescued a 3-year old boy.
The attacker shouted “Allah Akbar,” Le Parisien cited witnesses as saying.
Unconfirmed reports have emerged suggesting that the attacker might have links to Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL).
The terror group’s “news agency,” Amaq News, cited a source claiming that the perpetrator was an IS “fighter,” SITE, a terror monitoring group, reported.
Reports on Twitter claimed that the attacker had sworn allegiance to the group.
A self-described independent journalist, @Ibn_Sayyid, wrote that the assailant allegedly filmed the killings before sending the footage to “local contacts in Syria who posted it on Facebook.”
The female victim was “probably the partner of the commander, who herself was a police officer,” French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said.
The decision to carry out the raid was made after negotiations failed, he confirmed.
“Negotiations were opened, but it became clear that they would not succeed and police then entered the home, where they found the body of a woman,” Brandet said.
The boy rescued in the course of the raid was “in shock but unharmed,” the spokesman said, as cited by AFP.
The attack began around 9 pm local time with the fatal stabbing of a plainclothes policeman, identified by French media as Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, near his Magnanville home, AFP reported.
The assailant, reportedly a neighbor, stabbed the police officer nine times in front of the house before taking his partner and son hostage, Le Parisian reported. The outlet said the victim was a deputy chief of the judicial police at the Les Mureaux police station.
Neighbors calling police claimed they heard the man chanting Islamist slogans, Reuters France reported.
Elite Raid police units arrived on the scene at about 9:30 pm and cordoned off the area. An attempt to enter into negotiations with the attacker failed. The motive has yet to be determined.
French President Francois Hollande condemned the attack, saying the stabbed police officer and his partner, who held a civil post in France’s interior ministry, “were shamefully murdered,” according to AFP.
A special meeting devoted to the incident will be convened at the presidential palace on Tuesday morning. Hollande promised that “all light will be shed on the circumstances of this terrible tragedy.”