Terror
Knife-wielding terror suspect shot dead in france
REUTERS
FIRST POSTED: SATURDAY,
DECEMBER 20, 2014 01:50 PM EST | UPDATED: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2014
03:06 PM EST
Sirens. (Fotolia)
PARIS - French police
on Saturday shot dead a man shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is the
greatest") who stabbed and wounded three officers in a police station,
authorities said.
Interior Minister
Bernard Cazeneuve, who rushed to the scene, said the man was killed after he
attacked the policemen with a knife in a station in Joue-les-Tours, a suburb of
the city of Tours in central France.
Cazeneuve confirmed
the attacker had shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the attack, which he
said was "extremely violent".
The counter-terrorism
section of the Public Prosecutor's office has opened a probe for
"attempted murder and criminal conspiracy in connection with a terrorist
organization", the Paris Prosecutor's office said.
"There are
grounds to probe whether he acted alone, whether he followed orders, or whether
it was a mindless action," Public Prosecutor Jean-Luc Beck told BFM-TV.
The man was known to
police for common crimes but was not on any watch list of the French
intelligence services, Cazeneuve said, adding: "The probe is only
starting."
The three wounded
officers were hospitalized but were out of danger, he added.
France’s Homegrown Jihadists
PARIS — When Dominique Bons speaks with her soft Toulouse accent, there is something tragic and dignified about this thin blond woman, recently retired from the military. Last December, she learned by text message of the death of her son Nicolas.
A French citizen who had converted to Islam, Nicolas Bons, 30, died as a suicide bomber, fighting for the jihadi cause near Homs, Syria. A few months earlier, his half brother, Jean-Daniel, 22, had also been killed in Syria. The two had traveled together to Syria from Toulouse.
Once there, they became poster boys for foreign jihad. They even posted a video on YouTube, calling on their “brothers” in France to join them.
Ms. Bons, herself an atheist, had watched helplessly as Nicolas changed his lifestyle, turning away from friends, drinking, dancing, dating. But when he sent a message from Syria, she was at a loss to understand.
“To convert to Islam, O.K., maybe this is not so serious,” she told the television channel France 2. “But Syria, that was a big shock.”
Stories of homegrown jihadists are becoming tragically familiar this year in France. A month after Nicolas’s death, also in Toulouse, two teenagers (whose names have not been released as they are minors), left one morning apparently to go to school; instead, they went to the airport and boarded a plane to Istanbul...
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