PARIS • A terrorist who killed a French police officer and his wife posted a Facebook video from the scene of the murders calling for further strikes during the Euro 2016 championships, an expert on Islamists said yesterday.
Mr David Thomson, a terrorism expert at Radio France Internationale, said the video was posted using the Facebook Live application at 8.52pm on Monday (2.52am yesterday, Singapore time). It has since been removed.
In 13 minutes of footage shot at the home of his victims, Larossi Abballa announced that he had killed the police officer and his wife, who also worked at a police station in an administrative capacity, said Mr Thomson, the author of a book on young French radicals.
"I don't know what to do with him," Abballa says in the footage, indicating the couple's three- year-old child sitting behind him on a couch.
Prior to the video, Abballa had repeatedly stabbed the 42-year- old police commander in the abdomen late on Monday. He then barricaded himself inside the house in Magnanville, a suburb some 60km west of Paris, taking the policeman's wife and son hostage, before killing the woman.
The assailant, who was killed in a police raid about three hours later, also posted pictures of the dead couple on the account, which was in the name of Mohamed Ali. The toddler was "in shock but unharmed", a prosecutor said.
A "hit list" of VIPs, police and rappers was found at the scene of the crime, the Paris prosecutor said yesterday. The 25-year-old killer had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group three weeks ago, Mr Francois Molins told a news conference.
Abballa had been sentenced to prison in 2013 for membership in a group that was planning terrorist activities, French officials said yesterday. But he was released almost immediately after his trial, for reasons that remain unclear.
Earlier in the day, a police source said two people had been detained in connection with the attack, and Mr Molins confirmed that a third person had also been taken into custody as part of the investigation into the double murder.
Calling the killings "unquestionably a terrorist act", French President Francois Hollande said the victims were "murdered in a cowardly fashion".
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS
