Convert kills four at police HQ
A Muslim convert working at the Paris police headquarters stabbed three officers and a civilian colleague to death yesterday before he was shot dead as he tried to flee.
He was identified only as Mickael H, 45, a Martinique-born Frenchman who worked in IT. He is believed to have converted to Islam two years ago.
Investigators are trying to establish his motives. Police union officials initially said that the attack followed a conflict with colleagues.
Any connection with the Islamist terrorists who have killed more than 200 people in France since 2015 would be devastating for the French police, as the attacker worked in the intelligence section of the historic police headquarters close to Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris.
‘‘The mind boggles if it could turn out that the Islamists had their man right at the heart of the police information system,’’ a police union official said.
The killer, a civilian staff member since 2003, attacked a male colleague, also a civilian, at lunchtime with a long ceramic knife – a type often used by jihadists because they cannot be detected by metal scanners. He then stabbed to death three police officers, one of them a woman, as he fought his way to the exit. Another officer was wounded and was later taken to hospital in a serious condition.
Mickael H was then confronted in a courtyard by an officer armed with a Heckler & Koch automatic weapon, and was shot dead after he refused to drop his weapon. Initial reports suggested he was partially deaf.
President Emmanuel Macron visited the site briefly 90 minutes after the attack as the Ile de la Cite, an island in the Seine usually thronged with tourists, was sealed off.
Christophe Castaner, the interior minister, said that the attacker ‘‘had never presented any behavioural issues, he had never presented the slightest cause for alarm before going on his deadly rampage today’’.
Mickael H, from Fort-deFrance, is believed to have converted to Islam two years ago after marrying. Remy Heitz, the Paris prosecutor, said that antiterrorist police were standing by but the attack was initially being treated as a criminal case.
The attacker’s wife was taken into custody for questioning, and his home in Gonesse, in the northern Paris suburbs, was searched yesterday. A neighbour told the AFP news agency: ‘‘He is an ordinary person, very calm. I used to see him going to the mosque but his religious practice was normal.’’
Several police union officials spoke of a grievance with management and said that he had been summoned for a disciplinary meeting with his superior before the attack.
‘‘I know there were tensions between him and his direct supervisor,’’ said Christophe Crepin, head of Police-in-Anger, a small police association that is campaigning for better working conditions. ‘‘I do not think this is a terrorist act. He seems to have blown a fuse. It’s a real tragedy for us. Everyone knows everyone here.’’
The attack came a day after a demonstration in Paris by more than 20,000 police officers and employees over what they say are poor working conditions and plunging morale. Officers say they have been stressed by dealing with the threat of terrorism and by the violent yellow-vest protests that reached a peak last winter.
Police unions say that stress is responsible for a rise in police suicides: 50 officers in the 150,000-strong force have taken their lives this year.
Crepin, whose union is one of those leading the protests, linked the attack to the ‘‘depressed atmosphere’’ among officers. ‘‘When your work is suffering a problem you don’t lead a normal life,’’ he told FranceInfo television.
Police officers have been the target of a series of terrorist attacks since the mass killings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015. An officer was killed in that attack and a policewoman was shot dead in a Paris suburb the following day. Five others have been killed by gunshot and knife attacks since then. In 2016, in an attack inspired by Islamic State, a convicted terrorist killed a police officer and his companion, a civilian police employee, at their home in front of their child.
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of the French capital, tweeted: ‘‘Paris weeps for its own this afternoon after this terrifying attack in the police headquarters. The toll is heavy.’’
‘‘The mind boggles if it could turn out that the Islamists had their man right at the heart of the police information system.’’ Police union officials