A suspected Islamist attacker stabbed a French police commander to death outside his home and later killed his companion, a policewoman, in an attack claimed by Islamic State and denounced by the government as "an abject act of terrorism".
The assailant, a year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin, was jailed in for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan and had been under security service surveillance, including wiretaps, at the time of the attack, police sources said. The attacker filmed part of the assault live on the social network Facebook, according to David Thomson, a journalist specialised in radical Islamists. In his Facebook message, he linked the attack to the Euro soccer tournament now under way in France, saying: "The Euros will be a graveyard.
The attacker, named by police and justice sources as Larossi Abballa, knifed the year-old commander repeatedly in the stomach on Monday evening.
He then barricaded himself inside the house in Magnanville, a suburb some 60 km west of Paris, taking the man's year-old partner and their three-year-old son hostage. Police commandos shot Abballa dead when they stormed the house after negotiations failed but they found the woman, a secretary at a police station in a nearby suburb, killed with a knife, a source close to the investigation said. The boy was unharmed but in a state of shock. President Francois Hollande said the killings were "undeniably a terrorist act" and that the terrorist threat in France was very high.
Police searched Abballa's home and other locations on Tuesday and detained two people close to him for questioning. Islamic State claimed the attack. If it is confirmed that the group was behind the killing, it would be the first militant strike on French soil since the multiple attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and the national soccer stadium in Paris in November.
