PARIS (BLOOMBERG) - France will take steps to improve screening after a suspected terrorist attack in Paris last Thursday (Oct 3) in which a police employee knifed four colleagues to death and hurt two more, raising questions about national security.
The government will set up two task forces to make proposals by the end of the year to improve screening at the Paris police department intelligence services and at anti-terrorism intelligence services, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told newspaper Journal du Dimanche in an interview published on Sunday (Oct 6).
The assault comes some three months after France's anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard warned that the threat of terrorism had returned.
A wave of attacks has shaken the country since 2015, after assaults in the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery killed 17 people in Paris and then 130 at the Bataclan concert hall in the French capital.
Figuring out how last Thursday's event occurred and making sure that proper checks are in place within the country's intelligence services are "major" issues, Mr Philippe was quoted as saying.
An investigation is being conducted to find out whether intelligence data may have been leaked, he said.
The assailant, a 45-year-old man, had been working for the intelligence services' computer maintenance department since 2003. He assaulted his colleagues with a kitchen knife and an oyster knife he had left the office especially to purchase, according to France's anti-terrorism office.
French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner was scheduled to speak on French television at 1 pm local time on Sunday, and President Emmanuel Macron will attend a ceremony on Tuesday morning (Oct 8) at the Paris police department where the incident happened, Agence France-Presse reported last Saturday (Oct 5).
Mr Ricard described "a scene of extreme violence" during a news conference last Saturday, and said his office is still trying to understand the attacker's motives as well as the context that led to his act.
An anti-terror probe was opened last Friday after police accessed dozens of text messages the man exchanged with his wife prior to the attack. The fact that the assault had been planned, the nature of the killings and the man's religious commitment led investigators to suspect a terrorist act, the prosecutor said.
The attacker converted to Islam about a decade ago and is known to have approved of killings perpetrated for religious purposes, the prosecutor said. He had also been in contact with individuals belonging to a radical salafist movement and had exchanged religious comments with his wife less than an hour before the knifing.
