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France: Tunisian cut the throat of a police officer before being shot

A Tunisian slaughtered a police official on Friday in the entrance to the Rambouillet police station, near Paris, before being shot dead by a police officer.

“We will not give in” to “Islamist terrorism”, reacted President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter, after this attack targeting an administrative officer working at the police station of this quiet town, of nearly 26,000 inhabitants, located about sixty kilometers away south-west of Paris.

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The national antiterrorist prosecution announced that it had taken up the investigation for “assassination of a person holding public authority in connection with a terrorist enterprise and terrorist association”, while France has been marked in recent years by several stabbing attacks, particularly against the police.

Witnesses reported that the assailant shouted “Allah Akbar” (God is the greatest, in Arabic), according to a source close to the investigation.

Prime Minister Jean Castex denounced on Twitter a “barbaric and infinitely cowardly gesture” against “a daily heroine”. He went there with the Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin.

A security cordon prevented onlookers and journalists from approaching the police station, noted an AFP journalist. From their balconies, residents of the affluent residential area without commerce observed the comings and goings of the investigators.

The facts occurred around 12:20 GMT in the entry airlock of the police station, said a police source.

Unknown to the police

The victim, named Stรฉphanie, was an administrative officer of the secretariat of the Rambouillet police station, therefore an unarmed civil servant. She was returning from her lunch break when the assailant stabbed her twice in the throat, according to the first elements of the investigation.

The firefighters who intervened on the spot were unable to revive her, although she was seriously injured in the carotid artery. She had worked in Rambouillet for 28 years and was the mother of two daughters, aged 18 and 13.

The assailant was shot by a single police officer, according to a police source. In cardio-respiratory arrest, he died.

According to the identity papers found on him, Jamel G. was a 36-year-old Tunisian national.

Originally from the Sousse region, in eastern Tunisia, he arrived in France in 2009 and in 2019 had benefited from an exceptional employee residence permit, then a residence permit in December 2020, valid until in December 2021, according to the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office.

He was unknown to the police and intelligence services, several police sources confirmed to AFP.

On social networks, the profile of a thirty-something, who loves outdoor activities, is emerging. For several years, his public messages were devoted in number to the denunciation of Islamophobia.

Reinforced security

But from April 2020, at the time of the first confinement, he only publishes pious prayers and Koranic verses. On October 24, eight days after the assassination of college professor Samuel Paty, assassinated and beheaded by an 18-year-old from the Russian Republic of Chechnya for showing his students Charlie Hebdo cartoons, he changed his profile photo and joined a campaign called “Respect Mohammad prophet of God”.

Three people around him were taken into custody, a judicial source told AFP. According to sources close to the investigation, a person who welcomed the assailant on his arrival in France in 2009 is among them. The home of this person was searched late Friday afternoon, as was the home of the assailant in Rambouillet.

“The horror, once again which targets and strikes the police,” denounced the police union Alliance.

This tragedy comes as the police forces of the department where the attack took place, the Yvelines, remember the painful memory of the murder of a couple of police officers, stabbed in June 2016 in his flag in Magnanville, by a man claiming to be part of the Islamic State organization.

After the attack on Rambouillet, Gรฉrald Darmanin asked the prefects to strengthen the security around the police stations and gendarmerie brigades, “in particular with regard to reception”.

The police are among the recurring objectives of jihadist organizations, including the Islamic State (IS) group, while France has been affected in recent years by an unprecedented wave of Islamist attacks that have killed more than 250 people.

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