French police hold five over fatal knife attack at Paris HQ

From France 24

French police on Monday detained five people linked to a radicalised employee at the Paris police headquarters who killed four colleagues in a knife attack earlier this month, sources said.

Police staged raids at three locations in the northern suburbs of Paris, judicial sources and those close to the investigation said, confirming a report by the broadcaster RTL.

Mickael Harpon, a 45-year-old computer expert, stabbed to death four colleagues at the police headquarters on October 3 before being shot and killed.

One of the people detained Monday was an imam who preached at a mosque Harpon attended in Gonesse, who is on France’s “Fiche S” list of potential security risks, one source told AFP. Investigators have found that Harpon, who had access to classified data within the Paris police’s intelligence division, had been in close contact with the imam in the months before his knife rampage.

The killings have raised serious questions about how police failed to notice various signs of Harpon’s radicalisation in recent years, I thought the question was rather why Harpon’s colleagues who noticed his radicalistaion were ignored when they reported it, and a climate of policita correstness discouraged them from mentioning it ever again.