Shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ and stabbing a policewoman to death: despite the lockdown and the more than 100,000 deaths due to the coronavirus, there is no end to jihadist terror in France. A 49-year-old police officer was killed today with a dagger to the throat at the entrance to a police station in Rambouillet, some sixty kilometers southwest of Paris. The attacker, a Tunisian, was in turn mortally wounded by the response fire of the officers. “We will not give a step in the fight against Islamist terrorism,” President Emmanuel Macron warned in a tweet published in the late afternoon. “She was a policewoman, Stéphanie – underlines Macron – was killed in her police station in Rambouillet, on the already mangled lands of the Yvelines department. The Nation is at the side of his family, his colleagues and the police ».
Support and solidarity also came from the European Union. In recent years, France has already been hit hard by this kind of attacks, particularly against police officers, as indicated by the insane death dictates of ISIS. Just two days ago, the anniversary of the killing of police captain Xavier Jugelé, victim of a jihadist attack on the Champs-Elysées on 20 April 2017, was celebrated.
According to several police unions cited by BFM-TV, even today the bomber would have shouted ‘Allah Akbar’ as often happened in the past. Prime Minister Jean Castex and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin went to the site of the attack. “Our determination to fight terrorism in every form is more than ever intact”, assured the premier, who came to personally express his support to the “police and police officers”.
The facts on which the anti-terrorism prosecutor is now investigating occurred around 2.20 pm, at the entrance to the police station. The agent, who had an administrative role and not a patrol, was returning from lunch when the assailant gave her two blows with a knife to the carotid artery, according to the first elements of the investigation. At the time of the attack, Stéphanie was unarmed and died shortly after, on the spot. He had worked in Rambouillet for 28 years and today leaves behind two daughters aged 18 and 13. The assailant was also killed, a 36-year-old Tunisian, hitherto unknown to the French 007, who died of cardiac arrest after being hit by an agent’s fire. According to investigators, he arrived in France in 2009 and only later regularized.
In June 2016, the department of Yvelines, in the boundless hinterland of Paris, was the scene of another bloody attack. When a couple of police officers were brutally killed in their Magnanville cottage by the murderous fury of a self-styled ISIS bomber. Also in the same department, 6 months ago, on October 16, Samuel Paty, the school teacher beheaded by an eighteen year old native of Chechnya, was murdered. After the Rambouillet attack, Darmanin asked the prefects to strengthen security around the police stations.
Today’s attack is reminiscent of that of December 2014 at the Joué-les-Tours police station, in the Indre-et-Loire department, where the assailant was seriously injured by three policemen shouting ‘Allah Akbar’. In France alone, since 2015, over 260 people have died under the blows of jihadist terrorism. The latest attack on the agents dates back to 3 October 2019, when an employee of the Paris police prefecture stabbed three policemen and an administrative agent to death before being shot down himself.
The leader of the Lega Matteo Salvini also intervened on the matter, aligning himself with the positions of the ally Marine Le Pen. “The murderer, who entered France as an illegal immigrant more than ten years ago, was regularized in 2019. Marine Le Pen is right: anyone who enters illegally must only be expelled,” he wrote on Twitter. In the sea of reactions, there is also that of the French Council of Muslim Cult (CFCM) which strongly condemns what happened: “This barbaric act, which would have been accompanied by the cry ‘Allah Akbar’, is a horror that no religion can accept. “.