2014 Tours police station stabbing

2014 Tours stabbing attack

Location of Indre-et-Loire within France
Location Joué-lès-Tours
Date December 20, 2014 (2014-12-20)
Target Police officers
Attack type
Stabbing
Weapons Knife
Deaths 1 (the perpetrator)
Non-fatal injuries
3
Perpetrator Bertrand Nzohabonayo
Motive Radical Islamism

On 20 December 2014, a man in Joué-lès-Tours near the city of Tours in central France entered a police station shouting "Allahu Akbar" and began to attack officers with a knife, injuring three before he was shot and killed.

The stabbing attack is regarded by French authorities as an act of terrorism.[1][2]

Perpetrator

The attacker was identified as Bertrand Nzohabonayo, age 20, a French citizen and former rap musician born in Burundi in 1994.[3][4][5][6] The attacker had taken Bilal as his new name upon conversion to Islam, and had been posting Islamist material on his Facebook page, including a photograph of the black flag of the Islamic State.[7][1]

The attacker's radical ideology had been reported to French security services before the attack.[8]

In Burundi, a majority-Christian country, police arrested the attacker's brother, Brice Nzohabonayo, a man with known Islamist sympathies, and stated that they had informed French authorities that both brothers should be regarded as suspect due to their radical Islmaist opinions.[9]

Aftermath

Nzohabonayo, a recent convert to Islam, has been called the "first of the lone wolves," part of a "drumbeat" of Islamist attackers who struck France with acts of lone wolf terrorism in the weeks preceding the Charlie Hebdo shooting, attacks that began a month after ISIL released a video on 19 November 2014, in French, urging Muslims to carry out attacks against non-Muslims, "kill them and spit in their faces and run over them with your cars."[1][10][11][12] This series of attacks included the 2014 Nantes attack and the 2014 Dijon attack.[1] These three lone wolf attacks occurred on three consecutive days, although only the stabbing attack in Joué-lès-Tours has been officially categorized as a terrorist attack.[1] Although the three attacks were deemed unrelated with one another, the French government heightened the nation's security and deployed 300 soldiers to patrol the nation's streets.[13]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Cruickshank, Paul (16 November 2015). "Drumbeat of terror precedes slaughter that shocks France and the world". CNN. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  2. Leveille, David (22 December 2014). "France endures deadly attacks". Public Radio International. Reuters (credited in; not copy of). Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  3. "French police shoot dead knifeman who was shouting Islamic slogans". The Daily Telegraph. 20 December 2014. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  4. Lichfield, John (21 December 2014). "Man shot dead by police in jihadist attack in Tours". The Independent. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  5. Rodrigues, Jason (16 January 2015). "Terror attacks in Europe: the five danger zones". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  6. "France Dijon: Driver targets city pedestrians". BBC News. 21 December 2014. Retrieved 22 December 2014.
  7. Mulholland, Rory (21 December 2014). "French knife attacker Bertrand Nzohabonayo was Islamic convert; Man shot dead by French police had changed name to Bilal and posted ISIL flag on Facebook". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  8. "French anti-terror department investigates knife attack in Nice". Euronews. 4 February 2015. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  9. "Burundi arrests brother of suspect in French police attack". France 24. 22 December 2014. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  10. Lane, Oliver (12 January 2015). "In Pictures: France’s Three Weeks of Terror". Breitbart. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  11. "Paris terror attacks: West Yorkshire man, 21, arrested after Facebook post praises massacre". The Daily Telegraph. 17 November 2015. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  12. Molinié, William (15 November 2015). "Merah, Kouachi, Belhoucine, Nzohabonayo… Le terrorisme islamiste, une affaire de frères?". 20 minutes (France). Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  13. "France to deploy soldiers after spate of attacks". BBC News. 23 December 2014. Retrieved 26 December 2014.

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, March 06, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.