Tag Archives: Terrorism

Russian suspect in Istanbul attack: a shy student who found religion

Police patrolling at Istanbul airport

By Maria Tsvetkova

IKON-KHALK, Russia (Reuters) – When Rahim Bulgarov graduated from college in southern Russia with a diploma in tourism, his teacher expected him to go on to further study, or fulfill his dream of opening a car repair shop.

Instead, Bulgarov started going to the mosque with followers of a pious strain of Islam, and, according to a close relative and Egyptian security sources, went to Cairo last year to study Arabic.

Turkish state media have identified Bulgarov, 23, as one of the suspected suicide bombers who attacked Istanbul’s Ataturk airport on June 29, killing 45 people and wounding hundreds.

Several of the attackers were from Russia or ex-Soviet countries, making it the deadliest foreign attack by militants from that region since the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, carried out by two young ethnic Chechen brothers.

In the space of two years, Bulgarov changed from a shy young man who led a secular lifestyle to a suspected jihadist bomber, according to Reuters interviews with his teacher, an imam, a classmate and the close relative.

His case shows the challenges that Russian security agencies face identifying potential security threats out of the thousands of young people in Russia who are turning to ultra-conservative forms of Islam.

EGYPTIAN STAY

Three Egyptian security sources told Reuters Bulgarov spent 7 months and 12 days in Cairo, leaving in January this year, and that he signed up for Arabic classes at Al-Azhar University, an Islamic center of learning.

“He lived in a flat with another young Russian man in the Ain Shams area,” said one of the sources, referring to a suburb of Cairo.

Bulgarov was not on the radar of Egyptian security services until Russian authorities contacted them around a week ago seeking information on him and any other Russians he mixed with in Cairo, said the same source.

Bulgarov left Egypt on Jan. 13 for Turkey, according to the three Egyptian sources.

Some time after that, he returned to Russia and was interviewed by the Federal Security Service (FSB), which is responsible for counter-terrorism, and had to undergo a lie detector test, according to the relative, who did not want to be identified.

The relative said Bulgarov was then allowed to go home.

“He passed the test, he was fine,” said the relative.

Reuters could not confirm that the interview, a routine procedure in Russia that does not necessarily mean the authorities thought he was a security threat, took place. Local police and the FSB did not respond to requests for comment.

COMFORTABLE UPBRINGING

Bulgarov grew up in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, a Russian region on the northern slopes of the North Caucasus mountains where many people are Muslim.

But unlike other parts of the North Caucasus, such as nearby Chechnya and Ingushetia, there was no strong tradition of hardline Islamism or rebellion against Moscow’s rule.

Bulgarov’s family home is in the village of Ikon-Khalk, a settlement of the Nogai people, a Turkic ethnic group.

His upbringing was comfortable. His father is a tractor driver. His grandmother owns a deli store in the village which, among other items, sells food cooked by his mother.

Putting Bulgarov through college to get his tourism diploma would have cost his family nearly $3,000, according to Mardjan Dagujieva, the director of the college, a substantial sum by local standards.

At the college, Bulgarov was shy.

“When he dared to say a word in class, that was already a shock for us,” said Yevgeny Romanenko, a classmate.

He said Bulgarov at that time smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol – both habits which are forbidden according to most interpretations of Islam.

His teacher at the college, Gor Kurginyan, said Bulgarov was one of his best students with a dream to start a small business.

“He planned to launch a car repair shop along a road in his neighborhood,” said Kurginyan.

Bulgarov graduated from the college in 2011, and his teacher expected him to either pursue the workshop plan or keep studying, maybe at university in the nearby city of Pyatigorsk.

But when Kurginyan met up with some of his ex-students about two years ago, he heard the unexpected news that Bulgarov had devoted his life to Islam.

“I asked the guys: ‘And how is Rahim?'” said Kurginyan. “They told me he had … turned to Islam.”

RECRUITS TO MOSQUE

After Bulgarov graduated from college, he had been working on a farm and in construction in his Ikon-Khalk, according to his close relative.

But the village was changing. In 2013 or 2014, young local men started visiting the mosque at the end of his street, drawn to practicing Islam for the first time in their lives, and in particular to a very strict interpretations of the faith.

This mirrors a trend throughout the North Caucasus. According to a report this year by the International Crisis Group, poverty, corruption and police crackdowns in the region have left many young people feeling angry and persecuted.

Some of them have been drawn to radical forms of Islam which they feel offers a way to address injustices.

“More people started going to mosque,” said the imam at the mosque in Bulgarov’s village, Abdulla Kumykov. “It had been very few, about 10 people at Friday prayer. And now it’s 40-50, (taking up) about half of the prayer room.”

When a Reuters reporter visited last week, several men in their 20s and 30s hung around the mosque. They refused to speak with the female reporter, and insisted she did not cross into the mosque’s courtyard, saying women were not allowed in.

The imam, who could not explain why there had been an influx of new worshippers, spoke to the reporter outside the perimeter of the mosque.

He said Bulgarov had first come to the mosque around 18 months ago, and had prayed there regularly until he left for Egypt.

The close relative said Bulgarov left home for a second time in March this year, telling his family that he was traveling to find work in Labytnangi, a Russian mining settlement near the Arctic Circle.

The next time the relative knew of his whereabouts was when they learned he was a suspect in the Istanbul airport bombing.

(Additional reporting by Lin Noueihed and Ahmed Mohammed Hassan in CAIRO and David Dolan in ISTANBUL; Editing by Christian Lowe and Anna Willard)

At least 35 killed in attack on Shi’ite mausoleum north of Baghdad

Soldiers gather at site of suicide attack

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) – Islamic State claimed a triple suicide attack on Thursday evening near a Shi’ite mausoleum north of Baghdad, which killed at least 35 people and wounded 60 others, according to Iraqi security sources.

The attack on the Mausoleum of Sayid Mohammed bin Ali al-Hadi reignited fears of an escalation of the sectarian strife between Iraq’s Shi’ites and Sunnis.

The Shi’ite form a majority in Iraq but Sunnis are predominant in northern and western provinces, including Salahuddin where the mausoleum is located.

Prominent Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his militia, the Peace Brigade, to deploy around the mausoleum, near Balad, about 93 kilometers (58 miles) north of Baghdad.

Sadr’s militia is also deployed in Samarra, a nearby city that houses the shrine of Imam Ali al-Hadi, the father of Sayid Mohammed whose mausoleum was attacked on Thursday.

A 2006 bombing destroyed the golden dome of the shrine of Ali al-Hadi and his other son, Imam Hasan al-Askari, setting off a wave of sectarian violence akin to a civil war.

Pictures posted on social media showed a fire burning in the market located at the entrance of the Sayid Mohammed mausoleum. It was not clear if the site itself was damaged.

A man detonated an explosive belt at the external gate of the mausoleum at around 11 p.m., allowing several gunmen to storm the site and start shooting at worshippers on the occasion of the Eid al-Fitr festival, according to the security sources.

At least one gunmen blew himself up in the middle of the crowd while another was gunned down by the guard of the mausoleum before he could detonate his explosive belt.The site also came under rocket fire during the attack that was claimed by Islamic State. The ultra-hardline Sunni group said in a statement the attack was carried out by three suicide bombers wearing explosive belts.

The militants have lost ground since last year to U.S.-backed government forces and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias, but recent bombings showed they still have the ability to strike outside the territory they control in northern and western Iraq.

A massive truck bomb killed at least 292 people in a mainly Shi’ite shopping area of central Baghdad over the weekend, in the deadliest single bombing since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

(Reporting by Ghazwan Hassan and Ahmed Rasheed; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by G Crosse and Leslie Adler)

Islamist violence strains a poor nation’s warm welcome for refugees

Refugees pose for photo in Nigeria

By Joe Bavier

DIFFA, Niger (Reuters) – Unlike many victims of Islamist violence fleeing to Europe, Aba Ali found a warm African welcome closer to home. But even in southern Niger, where a local family accepted him as a brother, hospitality for refugees is now reaching its limits.

Ali, a 45-year-old mechanic, lost his home in neighboring Nigeria two years ago when he fled Boko Haram fighters who massacred his friends and neighbors.

Crossing into Niger, the world’s fifth poorest nation, he became one of the many refugees living with local people who themselves often have barely enough to feed their own children.

A surge in violence since last month, however, has displaced tens of thousands more, testing that spirit of open-armed acceptance in Niger’s Diffa region as shortages of food and water put communities under severe strain. Competition for scarce resources is creating friction and the risk of ethnic unrest.

Ali found a degree of security in Diffa, a region of blazing hot sand dotted with sparse trees and donkeys, thanks to Adamu Moumouni, a stranger who took him in when he had nothing.

“He became my family,” said Ali, tears streaming down his cheeks. “If it wasn’t for him, I would have no one here,” he added, his words barely audible over the bleating of goats on a small nearby plot of land that Moumouni gave him.

The United Nations says 2.4 million people have been displaced by Boko Haram’s seven-year campaign to establish an Islamic emirate which has spilled over Nigeria’s borders into Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Ali’s lasting memory of his home village of Malam Fatori in northeastern Nigeria is his elderly mother standing in the doorway as gunfire rang out. “She told me ‘Run! Run!'” he said.

He escaped, helped by a fisherman from Niger who ferried him across the river that forms the border between the two countries. From there, he watched helplessly as Boko Haram drove those still waiting on the far bank into the water.

“I saw women enter the water with babies on their backs, and when they reached the other side the babies were gone,” he said.

Ali’s two wives and five children survived and also got to Diffa, but he lost 19 friends the day he fled. His mother, who was in poor health, made it to Niger a year later, only to die after a few days.

“SUFFERING BROUGHT US TOGETHER”

When he arrived in Diffa, Ali was a broken man. Then he met Moumouni.

“It was the suffering that brought us together. What happened to them could happen to us,” Moumouni said.

Since then, members of the two men’s families have married and they’ve even named babies after each other.

Unlike Ali, some fleeing Boko Haram push on through Niger for Europe, making the dangerous journey across the Sahara and Mediterranean among an estimated 150,000 this year – some escaping violence, others simply seeking a better life.

In the wealthy nations of Europe, their reception has been mixed. Germany received one million migrants last year from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. But the number of arson attacks on migrants’ hostels there has shot up while Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door policy has come under heavy fire.

Other European nations are trying to stem the flow, saying they cannot cope, while countries on the separate Balkan migrant route have halted it by erecting border fences.

CRACKS FORM

In Niger, Diffa is hosting a quarter of a million people – more than one in three of the population – displaced by the insurgency. They include more than 80,000 Nigerians like Ali, who have been largely taken in and helped by local residents rather than accommodated in bleak refugee camps.

“People have a sense of collectivity,” Nigerien Interior Minister Mohamed Bazoum told Reuters. “It’s characteristic of Africa.”

But Diffa’s economy, once among Niger’s most robust, is in ruins. Boko Haram stalks the river border, which has been evacuated by the government, killing off a once lucrative fishing industry and leaving precious irrigated farmland fallow.

The security situation is only getting worse. On June 3, Boko Haram fighters launched one of their most daring raids yet on Nigerien soil, briefly seizing the town of Bosso in the southeast and killing 32 soldiers. 50,000 civilians fled.

After arriving in 2014, Ali found work in Diffa fixing motorcycles, but then they were banned to prevent attackers using them to make a getaway. Moumouni, a mason, began bringing him along to construction sites but now few people are building due to the constant threat of violence.

And still more people are fleeing. “More displacement means less capacity to absorb those displaced,” said Arjika Barke, International Rescue Committee coordinator in Diffa. “There are now areas that are saturated.”

This is raising tensions. Deadly violence broke out last month in one village between nomadic Fulani herdsmen and members of the Buduma ethnic group, who left their Lake Chad island homes last year following Boko Haram attacks there.

The cause was a dispute over access to a well being used by both displaced villagers and livestock.

“These groups lived together in peace before,” said Lamido Souley Mani Orthe, a Fulani chief.

The government is drilling more wells to defuse tensions, but Aboubacar Halilou of the conflict resolution charity Search for Common Ground says risks are growing as resources become increasingly scarce. “Both sides are arming now. Boko Haram and ethnic fighting – the two conflicts are linked,” he said.

Still, those with the least to offer stand ready to help.

Since the Bosso attack last month, Ali has let 45 new arrivals camp on the dusty ground of the courtyard Moumouni gave him. “These people who are here, we are obliged to care for them,” he said. “We can’t not help them.”

(Editing by Tim Cocks and David Stamp)

Eight suicide bombers target Lebanese Christian village

A general view of the Saint Elias church taken in the afternoon, before four suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the church after a series of suicide attacks in the village earlier in the day, in the Christian village of Qaa, Lebanon

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Eight suicide bombers attacked a Lebanese Christian village on Monday, killing five people and wounding dozens more, in the latest violent spillover of the five-year-old Syrian war into Lebanon.

Security sources said they believed Islamic State was responsible for the bombings in the village of Qaa on Lebanon’s border with Syria, but there was no immediate claim of responsibility.

A first wave of attacks involved four suicide bombers who struck after 4 a.m., killing five people, all civilians.

The first bomber blew himself up after being confronted by a resident, with the other three detonating their bombs one after the other as people arrived at the scene. The Lebanese army said four soldiers were among the wounded.

A second series of attacks, involving at least four bombers, took place in the evening as residents were preparing the funerals of those killed earlier. Two of the four bombers blew themselves up outside a church, security sources said. Nobody was killed. Medics put the number of injured at 15.

“It is clear from the pace of explosions that we have entered an episode from hell,” Wael Abu Faour, the health minister, told Reuters.

In comments to local media, the head of the Qaa local council urged residents to stay at home and shoot anyone suspicious. The provincial governor meanwhile imposed a curfew on Syrian refugees in the area.

Lebanese security services have been on heightened alert for militant attacks in recent weeks. Islamic State had urged its followers to launch attacks on “non-believers” during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began in early June.

Lebanon has been repeatedly jolted by militant attacks linked to the war in neighboring Syria, where the powerful Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah is fighting in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Friday warned of a threat posed by militants based in the border area between Syria and Lebanon, saying they were still preparing car bombs in the area.

(Additional reporting by Reuters TV; Writing by Tom Perry and Laila Bassam; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Latest gun control bid falters in Congress, Democrat sit-in ends

Democrats walk out of Capitol Hill after failing the gun control law

By Richard Cowan and Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Another attempt at gun control faltered in the U.S. Congress on Thursday despite outrage at the Orlando massacre, as a proposed ban on firearms sales to people being monitored for links to terrorism barely avoided being killed in the Senate.

In a procedural vote, the Senate narrowly rejected an attempt to scrap the plan by Republican Senator Susan Collins to prevent guns getting into the hands of people on two U.S. government terrorism watch lists.

But the proposal looked short of the support it would need to advance through the chamber, and Republican leaders said the Senate would switch from debating gun control to other matters until at least after the July 4 holiday.

It was the latest setback for proponents of gun restrictions who have been thwarted for years on Capitol Hill by gun rights defenders and the National Rifle Association.

Frequent efforts at gun control have failed despite anger at mass shootings like the killings at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and in San Bernardino, California, last year.

“Eventually this problem will get addressed again one of two ways: We find a breakthrough, which I will seek, or there will be another terrorist attack which will bring us right back to this issue. I hope we can do it without another terrorist attack,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who supported Collins.

A few hours earlier, Democratic lawmakers ended a sit-in protest in the House of Representatives over guns.

Fueled by Chinese food and pizzas, dozens of them stayed on the House floor all night, at times bursting into the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” before giving up their protest after 25 hours.

“It’s not a struggle that lasts for one day, or one week, or one month, or one year,” said Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and a key figure in the civil rights protests of the 1960s. “We’re going to win the struggle,” said Lewis, who led the House sit-in.

Dramatic protests by legislators are rare in the U.S. Capitol and the sit-in underscored how sensitive the gun control issue became after this month’s Florida attack, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Opinion polls show Americans are increasingly in favor of more restrictions on guns in a country with more than 310 million weapons, about one for every citizen.

ORLANDO ATTACK

After a gunman pledging allegiance to Islamic State fatally shot 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, some senators had seen resistance to gun restrictions softening because the issue had partly become one of national security.

But Collins’ measure received only 52 votes in the 100-seat Senate test vote, short of the 60 votes that would be needed for approval in future Senate procedural votes.

While her plan could be revived next month, it is unclear if she has the momentum to overcome pro-gun rights forces in Congress who argue that gun control measures in Congress have been too restrictive and trample on the constitutional right to bear arms. Four other gun control measures failed earlier this week.

Collins, a Maine lawmaker, wants to forbid gun sales to anyone on the U.S. government’s “No Fly List” for terrorism suspects or the “Selectee List” of people who receive extra security screening at airports.

Despite the lack of legislation, the gun debate has stirred passions. The House Democrats’ sit-in brought an outpouring of grass-roots activity.

Jennifer Hoppe, deputy director of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said that in less than 24 hours from Wednesday, about 130,000 calls were made from supporters of gun control to members of Congress.

First lady Michelle Obama backed the House Democrats’ protest.

“We have grieved for too many children and wept for too many families after shootings. Chicago. Tucson. Newtown. Charleston. Orlando. #Enough,” she wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

The Democrats were seeking votes on legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases, as well as measures to curb the sale of weapons to people on government watch lists

Republicans allied with the NRA gun rights group say that while they want to combat terrorism, they represent constituents who believe firmly in the constitutional right to bear arms.

“It’s a tough issue. For people like myself, who come from a hunting and fishing state, it’s pretty hard,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Utah Republican who voted against Collins.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Timothy Ahmann, Timothy Gardner and Eric Walsh, Doina Chiacu; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter Cooney)

Danish court finds pizzeria owner guilty of fighting for Islamic State

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A Copenhagen court found a Danish pizzeria owner guilty on Wednesday of joining Islamic State (IS) to fight in Syria, the first such case in the Nordic country.

The verdict comes amid concerns of increased radicalization among Muslims in Europe and deadly attacks claimed by Islamic State militants in Paris and Brussels.

The court found the 24-year-old defendant, who holds both Danish and Turkish passports, guilty of allowing himself to be recruited in 2013 by IS in order to commit terrorist acts in Syria.

The man, who was arrested in March 2015, had denied fighting for IS, but admitted to having worked as a baker for the group in Syria.

He is expected to be sentenced later on Wednesday.

Danish authorities have been on high alert since two people were killed in shooting attacks at a free speech event and at a synagogue in Copenhagen in February 2015.

In April Danish police arrested four other people suspected of having been recruited by IS to commit terrorist acts and two others of breaking Danish weapons law.

More than 125 people from Denmark are believed to have joined IS after going to Syria and Iraq, the intelligence service said in October, adding that at least 27 of them had died there.

(Reporting by Nikolaj Skydsgaard; Editing by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Gareth Jones)

U.S. arrests Indiana man it says planned to join Islamic State

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An 18-year-old man who authorities said planned to fly to Morocco and travel to Islamic State-controlled territory to join the group was arrested in Indiana on Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department said.

FBI agents arrested Akram Musleh, of Brownsburg, Indiana, as he was attempting to board a bus from Indianapolis to New York, from where he planned to fly to Morocco, the department said in a statement.

“The criminal complaint alleges that he planned to provide personnel (himself) to ISIL,” the statement added, referring to the militant Islamist group.

If convicted, Musleh faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, a lifetime of supervised release and a $250,000 fine, the statement said.

(Reprting by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Dan Grebler and Peter Cooney)

Israel eyes law to remove online content inciting terrorism

Israeli Police search for suspects

By Tova Cohen

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel’s Justice Ministry is drafting legislation that would enable it to order Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media to remove online postings it deems to be inciting terrorism. “We are working on draft legislation, similar to what is being done in other countries; one law that would allow for a judicial injunction to order the removal of certain content, such as websites that incite to terrorism,” Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said.

“There should be some measure of accountability for Internet companies regarding the illegal activities and content that is published through their services,” Shaked told a cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv this week.

Israel blames a wave of Palestinian attacks which erupted in October last year on incitement to violence by the Palestinian leadership and on social media. Palestinian leaders say many attackers have acted out of desperation in the absence of movement towards creating an independent Palestinian state.

A spokeswoman for Shaked said it was too early to say what measures or sanctions might be included in the law, which would need parliamentary approval, but that it was likely to be similar to those introduced in France.

France has made far-reaching changes to surveillance laws since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo last year. It has taken steps to blacklist jihadi sites that “apologize for terrorism”, but stopped short of using such laws to censor major Internet services. “The legislation … will focus on removing prohibited content, with an emphasis on terrorist content, or blocking access to prohibited content,” Shaked’s spokeswoman said.

Governments around the world have been grappling with how to block online incitement to criminal activity, while major Internet services have stepped up campaigns to identify and remove Web postings that incite violence. Facebook, Google and Twitter are working more aggressively to combat online propaganda and recruiting by Islamic militants while trying to avoid the perception they are helping the authorities police the Web. Turkey has regularly censored YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in domestic political disputes. In 2015, more than 90 percent of all court orders for Twitter to remove illegal content worldwide came from Turkey, the company has reported.

Russia has used anti-terrorist laws to censor independent web sites, media organizations and global Internet sites, while China’s tightly controlled Internet blocks what it considers terrorist propaganda under general laws against incitement to criminal activity.

Shaked said governments and Internet services need to find ways to cooperate so that companies can quickly take down content deemed criminal that has been published on their platform. “We are promoting cooperation with content providers, sensitizing them as to content that violates Israeli law or the provider’s terms of service,” Shaked said. A spokesman for Facebook in Israel declined to comment. Google’s YouTube subsidiary has clear policies that prohibit content like gratuitous violence, hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts, a company spokesman said. “We remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We also terminate any account registered by a member of a designated ‘foreign terrorist organization’,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankfurt; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Boko Haram shoot dead 18 women at funeral in northern Nigeria

YOLA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants have shot dead 18 women at a funeral in Nigeria’s northeast, rampaging through a village, setting houses on fire and shooting at random, witnesses and local government officials said on Friday.

The attack took place at about 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) on Thursday in the village of Kuda in Adamawa State. Resident Moses Kwagh told Reuters that people waited until three hours after the attack and had then counted 18 women’s bodies.

Some women were still missing, he said.

A police source confirmed the attack but said it was not yet clear how many people had been killed. The military did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmaker Emmanuel Tsamdu told Reuters: “I am yet to get the details on how it happened and the real number of people killed. I have sent hunters to go to the area and get me the details because people are afraid to go to the village.”

Kuda is close to the Sambisa Forest, a vast colonial-era game reserve where Boko Haram militants hide in secluded camps to avoid the Nigerian military. The village was attacked by Boko Haram militants in February.

Under President Muhammadu Buhari’s command and aided by Nigeria’s neighbors, the army has recaptured most of the territory seized by Boko Haram, but the group still regularly stages guerrilla attacks.

“When we said that Boko Haram is still in this place some people sit in Abuja and claim that there is no more Boko Haram, but see what has happen,” Kwagh said.

(Reporting by Emma Ande; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Louise Ireland)

French police couple killed in attack claimed by Islamic State

Police at the scene where a French police commander was stabbed to death in front of his home in the Paris

By Chine Labbé and Simon Carraud

PARIS/LES MUREAUX (Reuters) – A Frenchman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State stabbed a police commander to death outside his home and killed his partner, who also worked for the police, in an attack the government denounced as “an abject act of terrorism”.

Larossi Abballa, 25, also took the couple’s three-year-old son hostage in Monday night’s attack. The boy was found unharmed but in a state of shock after police commandos stormed the house and killed the attacker.

Born in France of Moroccan origin, Abballa was jailed in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan and had been under security service surveillance, including wiretaps, at the time of the attack, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.

The attacker told police negotiators during the siege he had answered an appeal by Iraq-based Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “to kill infidels at home with their families”, Molins told a news conference.

“The killer said he was a practicing Muslim, was observing Ramadan and, that three weeks ago, he had pledged allegiance to … Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” Molins said.

Police found a bloodied knife at the scene along with a list of other potential targets including rap musicians, journalists and police officers, the prosecutor said.

The killings came as France, which has been under a state of emergency since Islamic State gunmen and bombers killed 130 people in Paris last November, was on high security alert for the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, which began last Friday.

In a video posted on social networks, Abballa linked the attack to the soccer championship, saying: “The Euros will be a graveyard.”

The video had been removed from Facebook on Tuesday. Michelle Gilbert, a Paris-based spokeswoman for Facebook, said the company’s guidelines forbade hate messages and aimed to remove such content swiftly from the website once alerted.

“ABJECT ACT OF TERRORISM”

The attacker knifed 42-year-old police commander Jean-Baptiste Salvaing repeatedly in the stomach on Monday evening.

He then barricaded himself inside the house in Magnanville, a suburb 60 km (40 miles) west of Paris, taking the policeman’s partner Jessica Schneider, 36, and their boy hostage. Schneider, a secretary at a police station in a nearby suburb, was killed with a knife, Molins said without giving details.

Islamic State claimed the attack. “God has enabled one of the caliphate’s soldiers in city of Les Mureaux near Paris to stab to death the deputy police chief and his wife,” a broadcast on its Albayan Radio said.

It was the first militant strike on French soil since the multiple attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and the national soccer stadium in Paris in November.

“An abject act of terrorism was carried out yesterday in Magnanville,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after an emergency government meeting, before visiting Les Mureaux, where the police commander worked.

President Francois Hollande said the killings were “undeniably a terrorist act” and that the terrorist threat in France was very high.

Police searched Abballa’s home and other locations on Tuesday and detained three people close to him for questioning.

Details started to emerge on the profile of the attacker. Abballa was born in the nearby town of Meulan and lived in Mantes-la-Jolie, where he had set up a fast food outlet in April, documents from the Versailles court showed.

He was given a three-year prison sentence in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan. His name appeared in a separate ongoing investigation into a man who went to Syria, but he was not considered a threat, a source close to the investigation said.

Abballa had also been convicted three times on charges of aggravated theft and driving without a license, another source close to the investigation said.

David Thomson, an RFI radio journalist specialized in Islamic radicalism, wrote on his Twitter page that Abballa had filmed himself at the site of the attack and posted the message on Facebook.

With the couple’s boy behind him, Abballa said: “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with him,” Thomson wrote.

Islamic State’s claim of responsibility came after the Islamist militant group also claimed responsibility for the killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

“In Orlando after the terrible homophobic terrorist attacks and Magnanville in a different way, the same ideology of death with the same beliefs (has been at work): kill and spread terror, contest who we are and prevent us from living freely,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament.

(Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas, Marc Joanny, Matthieu Rosemain, Richard Lough in Paris and Muhammad Yamany in Cairo; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Paul Taylor and Janet Lawrence)