Paris stabbing: Attacker who killed four people at police HQ had ‘likely’ Islamist links

Autopsies ‘attest to a scene of extreme violence’ in seven-minute rampage

The man who stabbed three officers and an administrative worker to death at a police headquarters in Paris on Thursday had “likely” links with Islamists, the city’s prosecutor has said.

The attacker, a civilian employee who has not been named, “had likely contacts with members of the Salafist movement”, Jean-Francois Ricard said.​ Salafism is an ultra-conservative reform movement within Islam.

Mr Ricard said autopsies performed on the victims “attest to a scene of extreme violence” in the attack near the Notre Dame cathedral that lasted at least seven minutes.

The knifeman, who was shot and killed by police in the attack, had converted to Islam about 10 years ago, exchanged 33 texts of a religious character with his wife ahead of the attack, the prosecutor said on Saturday.

Mr Ricard said he had been accused of domestic violence a decade ago. The wife of the killer is in custody until Monday.

A fifth person was seriously injured in the stabbing.

French prosecutors opened an investigation on Friday into Thursday’s attack and said it could be terror-related.

The 45-year-old attacker worked as a technology administrator in the Paris police intelligence unit.

David Le Bars, head of the Union of National Police Commissioners, told French broadcaster BFM TV the decision to open a terror investigation came from easily accessible sources found in a search of the attacker’s home.

“We knew that searching through his computer histories, the websites visited, his relations, we would quickly have some information,” Mr Le Bars said.

The rookie officer who shot the stabber had completed police academy training just six days before the attack, Paris police chief Didier Lallement said at a news conference on Friday.

Assigned to security duty at the large police compound across the street from Notre Dame Cathedral, the trainee ran into the courtyard to counter the attack and confronted the 45-year-old administrator, Mr Lallement said.

The French capital has been rocked by several major attacks in the last four years.

Coordinated bombings and shootings by Isis militants in November 2015 at the Bataclan theatre and other locations around Paris killed 130 people in the deadliest attacks in France since the Second World War.