Notre Dame attacker ‘pledged allegiance to IS’

A MAN who attacked a policeman with a hammer outside Notre Dame cathedral in Paris had pledged allegiance to Islamic State in a video, it emerged yesterday, four days after an attack claimed by IS in London.

The 40-year-old man was shot and wounded by police on Tuesday after lunging at the officer in a square full of tourists in front of the cathedral.

The attack, which came with France on high alert after jihadists killed seven people in London on Saturday, caused panic at one of the country’s top visitor attractions. Around 1,000 people were in the cathedral at the time.

The video in which the man pledges allegiance to IS was found by police who searched the apartment he was renting in Cergy outside the French capital, the source said.

During the attack, the man had shouted “this is for Syria”, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said.

France is part of the US-led international coalition fighting IS and has carried out air strikes against militants in Syria.

Documents found on the attacker identified him as a 40-year-old Algerian student doing a doctorate on the media at a university in France. He had also been carrying kitchen knives, the interior minister said.

Heavily armed elite police had searched his apartment on Tuesday night. A tenant of the apartment building housing students described him as “very quiet”.

The suspect’s thesis director at the University of Lorraine, where he enrolled in 2014, said he had showed “no outward sign of an excessive adherence to Islam”.

“When I knew him, he had a pro-Western, pro-democratic outlook,” Arnaud Mercier, who said he had not heard from him since November, said.