“The Republic has just lost one of its daily heroines ,” lamented French Prime Minister Jean Castex, after the death of a police officer this Friday at noon at the Rambouillet police station, in the Yvelines department, southwest of Paris.
The victim, a 49-year-old mother of two, was stabbed several times in the neck and, despite the intervention of firefighters, succumbed to her injuries. Her alleged assailant, a man of Tunisian nationality, died after being shot twice by a colleague of the agent.
The event occurred at 2:20 p.m. , when the official was returning from her rest. According to the information collected by various testimonies evoked by ‘Le Monde’, the assailant would have been noticed walking with his phone in hand in front of the police station.
The individual “would have taken advantage of the fact that the agent went through the double-door entrance of the police station to follow her and wait for the door to close, thus blocking the electronic control device at the entrance,” the publication explains.
Unknown to the intelligence services
“Witnesses claim to have heard the attacker shouting ‘ Allahu akbar !’ twice inside the lock, but they were on the sidewalk, several meters from the place, “says the same source to the French newspaper.
The authorities allegedly found several documents among the assailant’s personal belongings. According to them, the man would have been born in 1984 and arrived in France in 2009, where he was regularized in 2019 . Several police sources confirmed to AFP that he was a total stranger to the police and intelligence services.
The Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office assumes the investigation
The Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office will be in charge of clarifying the details of the tragic event for the following reasons: “the actual development of the events that includes identification elements [the tracking carried out by the assailant before proceeding to the act], the type of crime, the occupation of the victim [police officer] and also the words spoken by the author at the time of the attack, ”summed up the anti-terrorist prosecutor, Jean-François Ricard, at the scene of the events.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office announced the opening of an investigation into the murder charges of a person depositary of public authority in relation to a terrorist company and association of terrorist criminals. The Central Directorate of the Judicial Police and the General Directorate of Internal Security will be in charge of jointly carrying out the investigations.
“We will not abandon our fight against Islamist terrorism”
“Our determination in the fight against terrorism in all its forms is more intact than ever,” said the head of the Government, Jean Castex, leaving the Rambouillet police station, where he attended, together with the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Darmanin, to “give all our support to the police and officers of the police station.”
In the same vein, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the events through his Twitter account: “He was a policeman. Stéphanie was murdered at her police station in the already battered land of Yvelines [the terrorist attack that killed Professor Samuel Paty last October occurred in the same department in the Paris region].
The Nation is at the side of his family, his colleagues and the police force. We will not abandon our fight against Islamist terrorism, ”the president wrote.
