A female police employee was stabbed to death by a Tunisian man at a police station southwest of Paris on Friday in what prosecutors suspect may have been an Islamist terror attack.
The attacker was fatally wounded when an officer shot him at the station in Rambouillet, a wealthy commuter town about 60 kilometres from Paris, a police source told AFP on condition of anonymity. The attacker shouted, ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great), according to a source.
Prosecutors said they were opening a ‘terror probe’ into the attack, which took place in the secure entrance area of the station at around 2.20 pm.
The 48-year-old woman was stabbed twice in the throat, the police source said. According to reports, France’s domestic intelligence service will participate in the inquiry. France remains on high alert over a string of jihadist killings that have claimed hundreds of victims in recent years.
The attack comes in the wake of developments in the case of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish French doctor. A French High Court has ruled that the perpetrator, Kobili Traorй, could not stand trial, even though no one contested that he had brutally beaten Halimi and thrown her out of a third-floor window, while declaring ‘Allahu akbar’.
The court ruled that he had been under the influence of cannabis and had had a ‘delirious episode’, and thus could not be held criminally responsible for his actions.