Paris Police Kill Attacker Wearing Fake Explosive Vest
On Thursday, the Associated Press reports, outside a police station, in Paris, police officers shot and killed a man waving a knife and wearing what turned out to be a fake explosive vest. The incident came on the one year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
The prosecutor’s office said the assailant was carrying a document bearing the emblem of the Islamic State and “an unequivocal claim of responsibility in Arabic.” He shouted “Allahu akbar!” at police before he was killed.
Video shot from a window above the station and provided to The Associated Press showed the suspect’s body lying on the ground in a pool of blood as a sniffer dog was called in to check the body, along with a bomb-detecting robot. More video aired later on iTele TV showed a police explosives specialist cutting open the dead man’s jacket to check for live explosives.
Alexis Mukenge, who witnessed the shooting, told iTele that police shouted, “Stop! Move back!” before firing twice at the man, who immediately fell to the ground.
Authorities did not publicly identify the suspect. However, a French security official said police were “working on the hypothesis” that the assailant is a 20-year-old Moroccan who was involved in a minor 2013 robbery in the southern Var region.
The official identified the suspect as Ali Sallah, of Casablanca. The attacker’s fingerprints, he said, matched Sallah’s, who was in France illegally and had been ordered to leave after the 2013 incident.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.