Paris police killing ‘a terrorist act’ says Hollande, after attacker pledged allegiance to Isil and stabbed policeman and his wife

The latest from the Telegraph on the matter of the murder of a Police officer and his wife in their Paris home last night. The whole family were taken hostage by an already convicted jihadist; their 3 year old son has survived.

Apoliceman and his wife were killed in a frenzied knife attack at their home in a Paris suburb on Monday night by a man who reportedly shouted “Allahu Akhbar”. 

The man suspected to have killed a French policeman and his partner in a terror-linked attack had been sentenced in 2013 for taking part in a jihadist organisation with links to Pakistan, press agency AFP reported sources saying on Tuesday. 

They identified him as Larossi Abballa, 25, adding that he had been sentenced to a three-year term – six months of which were suspended – for “criminal association with the aim of preparing terrorist acts,” in a trial with seven other defendants.

French police sources said the killer had pledged allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

French President Francois Hollande said that the stabbing attack was “incontestably a terrorist act.”

Mr Hollande said on Tuesday that France was facing a terror threat “of a very large scale.”

“France is not the only country concerned (by the terrorist threat), as we have seen, again, in the United States, in Orlando,” he said.

Isil claimed responsibility for the killings in a statement released by the Amaq news agency, the group’s propaganda outlet, which it also used to announce that the Orlando massacre was perpetrated by an Isil fighter.

“Source to Amaq agency: Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife,” Amaq’s statement said.

The couple’s three-year-old son was rescued (“shocked but unharmed,”) after police stormed the home in the north-western Paris suburb of Magnanville and shot dead the attacker.  The prosecutor in the Versailles area outside Paris said the little boy was receiving medical attention.

Police sources said the attacker was a former soldier and a neighbour of the couple. 

Witnesses heard the assailant, described as a teenager or in his early 20s, shout “Allahu Akhbar”, Arabic for “God is great”.

Counter-terrorism prosecutors were placed in charge of the investigation, which had initially been treated as a criminal case.