French police officer stabbed to death

By Shweta Desai

PARIS (AA) - An assailant was shot dead after he fatally stabbed a woman police officer with a knife inside a police station on the outskirts of Paris on Friday afternoon.

The motive behind the attack is yet to be ascertained, however French authorities are treating the killing as a terror attack. The national anti-terrorism police have taken up the investigation into the attack.

The police have detained three accomplices, who were reportedly part of the assailant's group.

President Emmanuel Macron minced no words in branding the attack as an act of Islamist terror. "In the fight against Islamist terrorism, we will not give up," he said on Twitter.

He disclosed the victim's name as Stephanie, who was killed "on the already damaged land of Yvelines." The Nation is at the side of her family, colleagues and the police, he said.

According to the Versailles prosecutor's office, quoted in Le Parisien news, the attack took place around 2.30 p.m. (1230GMT) as a 36-year-old Tunisian national entered the Rambouillet police station and stabbed the 49-year-old police officer in the throat.

Other police officials opened fire, killing the attacker.

The female officer, a mother of two teenage children, suffered severe injuries in the carotid artery and succumbed to her injuries.

Le Parisien reported that the assailant is believed to have arrived in France in 2009 and is unknown to the police and territorial intelligence.

The national anti-terrorism team will examine the course of events, the victim's identity, the assailant and the remarks made by him at the time of the attack, BFMTV quoted the public prosecutor anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex recalled Yvelines department of the Ile-de-France region on the outskirts of Paris as a site of similar attacks, most recently the killing of school teacher Paty in October 2020 and before that Magnanville stabbing attack in 2016 claimed by Daesh/ISIS terrorist group against two police officials and a civilian.

Speaking from the site of the attack, Castex said: "Our determination to fight terrorism in all its forms is more than ever intact."

Expressing his support to the security forces, he said: "The Republic has just lost one of its everyday heroines, in a barbaric gesture of infinite cowardice."

Meanwhile, far-right opposition leader Marine Le Pen took the opportunity to use the stabbing to mount an attack on immigrants.

"We must stop regularizing illegal immigrants. When a man enters our home violating French law by being in an irregular situation, the possibility of regularizing him must be removed from the law," she said on Twitter.

This is the second knife attack to occur against public officials in recent weeks. In February, an official at the reception center for asylum seekers in southwest France was stabbed to death by an asylum seeker, reportedly after his refugee status was rejected.

The frequency of such attacks has increased fears over the resurgence of extremism. Last September, a Pakistani man carried out an attack outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, injuring two people with a meat cleaver. This was followed by the gruesome killing of Samuel Paty by a young Chechen refugee and the stabbing of three people in a church in Nice in October.

To fight against the tide of Islamist extremism and radicalization, the Macron government introduced controversial legislation termed 'bill confirming respect for the principles of the Republic,' which is widely condemned nationally and internationally for indiscriminately targeting the French Muslim population.