Police yesterday arrested three acquaintances of Larossi Abballa, the French jihadist who killed a police officer and his partner, a police secretary, at their home at Magnanville, northwest of Paris, on Monday. The men are aged 27, 29 and 44, Paris prosecutor François Molins said.
In a killing that has horrified France and shaken the security forces, Abballa stabbed police commandant Jean-Baptiste Salvaing (42) nine times in the abdomen, outside the two-storey bungalow he shared with his partner Jessica Schneider (36).
Abballa then entered the house and slashed Schneider’s throat in front of the couple’s three-year-old son Mathieu.
Police stormed the house, killing Abballa, at midnight on Monday. The boy was physically unharmed but in shock, and was taken to hospital in Paris.
Prime minister Manuel Valls told the National Assembly that 16 suspected terrorists have been arrested in two weeks.
Reacting to the murders of Salvaing and Schneider, president François Hollande said France “has mobilised considerable force” against “the very substantial terrorist threat” confronting the country.
“A new threshold of horror has been crossed,” Mr Valls said. “It was at their home, in the privacy of their family, that the couple were targeted.”
Mr Valls linked the killings in Magnanville to the massacre at a gay club in Orlando on Sunday, saying it was “the same ideology, the same conviction . . . It is a global threat and the end of a certain form of insouciance for our societies. It will be a long battle . . . probably for a generation.”
Plainclothes police
Mr Molins said Salvaing, who was the plainclothes deputy head of judiciary police at Les Mureaux commissariat, was attacked between 8pm and 8.20pm. He shouted to neighbours to call the police. They heard the killer scream “Allahu Akhbar”.
It is not clear whether Abballa knew Salvaing or how he found his address. Mr Molins said that during negotiations, Abballa “said he knew the victim was a policeman and threatened to blow everything up if police entered”. Salvaing had served in the Yvelines department for 13 years and was previously assigned to the commissariat at Mantes-la-Jolie, where Abballa lived.
Abballa had a record for theft and violent crime. In 2013, he was convicted of participation in a network that sent French jihadists to Pakistan and Afghanistan. “In the course of negotiations with [anti-terrorist police] RAID, the killer said he was a Muslim and was fasting for Ramadan,” Mr Molins said. “He said he had pledged allegiance to the commander of the faithful of the Islamic State, emir al-Baghdadi, three weeks ago, and that he was responding to a communique by this emir ordering ‘the killing of infidels at home with their families’.” Islamic State is also known as Isis.
At 8.52pm, Abballa posted a 12-minute video claiming responsibility from inside his victims’ home on Facebook Live. He transmitted the video to about 100 contacts. He also posted two claims of responsibility via Twitter. “One answered favourably to sheikh Adnani,” Abballa said in the video, referring to Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the official spokesman of Islamic State. “The Euro will be a cemetery,” Abballa said. The Euro 2016 soccer tournament ends on July 10th.
Facebook photographs
Abballa also posted photographs of his victims on Facebook. Mathieu appeared on the sofa behind him in the video. “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with him,” Abballa said.
Mr Molins said “a list of targets mentioning personalities and professions such as rap singers, journalists, police and public personalities” was found in the house. Police seized “three telephones, three knives, and in particular a bloody knife resting on the table”.
In Abballa’s car, parked beside the house, police found a Koran, a white robe and three religious books.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the murders by its “combatant” within hours, through the group’s “news” agency Amaq. The group used the same procedure to take credit for the Orlando massacre.
Seven police and soldiers have been killed by jihadists in France since 2012.
