Convicted terrorist Larossi Abballa fatally stabs Jean-Baptiste Salvaing before killing officer’s partner in attack claimed by Isis

The French government has denounced an “abject act of terrorism” after a man with a previous terrorist conviction carried out a gruesome knife murder of a police commander and his partner at their home outside Paris in the presence of their three-year-old son.

Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, had returned to his home in the quiet residential area of Magnanville 30 miles (50km) west of Paris between 8pm and 8:20pm on Monday night in plain clothes, when Larossi Abballa, a Frenchman previously convicted of taking part in a jihadi recruitment network and claiming allegiance to Islamic State, lay in wait for him hidden behind a gate.

Larossi Abballa was on a French monitoring list and is also reported to have been recently identified and monitored as part of the entourage of a man who had recently left for Syria. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Salvaing first managed to escape and shouted at neighbours to call the police, but Abballa caught up with him on the pavement and repeatedly stabbed him in the stomach, killing him.

Abballa, 25, then ran into the house and held hostage the commander’s 36-year-old partner, who worked as a police administrator in a police station in nearby Mantes-la-Jolie, as well as the couple’s three-year-old son.

Elite police squads were called to the scene, evacuated neighbours, sealed off the area and cut off the electricity, plunging the street into darkness.

Police negotiators attempted to talk to Abballa, who said he was a soldier for Isis and had sworn allegiance to the group. He said that he had deliberately targeted police.

The negotiations failed when Abballa first told police to stay away from the door then cut off communications. Shortly before midnight, loud explosions and shots were heard as police stormed the house and killed the attacker. They found the woman dead from a knife-wound to the neck, and rescued the couple’s son alive but in a state of shock.

The French state prosecutor, François Molins, said that during the negotiations with police, Abballa had said he was a practising Muslim and observing Ramadan and that he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, three weeks ago. Abballa said he had responded to an Isis appeal to “kill non-believers at home with their families”. He said he had known that his target was a police officer.

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After the raid, police found inside the house a target list including “rappers, journalists, police officers and public personalities”. They also found three phones and three knives including a bloody knife placed on the table-top. In Abballa’s car outside they found a Qur’an, a white djellaba garment and a book called “Authentic Belief”.

Molins said that at 8:52pm, Abballa had posted a 12-minute video on his Facebook page as well as two tweets in which he claimed responsibility for the attack.

David Thomson, a French journalist specialising in French jihadism, tweeted that the attacker had posted images of the attack and filmed himself at the scene inside the house with the three-year-old boy behind him on the sofa. Abballa said, with the boy seated behind him: “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with him.”

Thomson reported that the Facebook account was deactivated and the video was being examined by police.

The three-year-old was carried from the scene by police after Abballa was killed by the elite squad. A prosecutor said the boy was “in shock but unharmed”.

The mayor of Magnanville, Michel Lebouc, visited Allée de Perdrix, where the double killer struck. He said the boy was being looked after by social services, adding that children at the boy’s school would be offered counselling

“[The killer] was not at all known in Magnanville,” he said. “I understood he lived in Mantes-la-Jolie. He came to carry out an attack in Magnanville because he wanted to hit the state in its flesh, so he attacked two policemen who worked for for the nation.”

He said the woman had been dead before the police moved in. “The [police] assault took place this night. The mother of the small boy was already dead when the assault took place. The small boy has been evacuated to the care of social services in Paris.”

Allée de Perdrix was sealed off by French police on Tuesday. The property where the police officer was killed is in a pretty street of relatively modern and uniformly off-white tiled roof houses and bungalows, opposite a playing field with a white picket fence.

The police officers moved in two years ago and were well known locally. The woman who was killed was active at the local town hall.

A French police officer lays flowers while paying tribute to his colleagues killed in a knife attack near their home in Magnanville. Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP

Neighbour Monique Fohrer said she had first heard sirens at around 8.45pm on Monday. As the evening progressed, she said the scene was “like something out of a warzone”.

“It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Magnanville,” she said. “If it wasn’t so tragic, you’d have thought it was a scene in a film.”

Fohrer said after rapid response police arrived, locals heard gunfire some time before midnight.

“We guessed it was the police going in and they had shot the man inside. Then we heard the woman who was being held hostage had had her throat slit. We didn’t know at that point that it was a terrorist.”

She added: “All we can think of is the horror for that poor boy. It is unthinkable.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/14/french-police-officer-wife-murdered-larossi-abballa-isis?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+morning+briefing+2016&utm_term=177259&subid=13982079&CMP=ema_a-morning-briefing_b-morning-briefing_c-US_d-1