France investigates the radicalization of the aggressor in the latest knife attack

A woman hands a bouquet of flowers to a police officer next to the Rambouillet police station (near Paris) where an agent was killed last Friday.BERTRAND GUAY / AFP

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The French authorities are investigating how the Tunisian citizen, identified by the media as Jamel Gorchene, became radicalized until killing a police officer in Rambouillet last Friday in the name of Allah, 50 kilometers from Paris. The antiterrorist prosecutor, Jean-François Ricard, explained this Sunday that his Facebook posts revealed his sympathy with jihadism, and that, in the minutes before the attack, he heard religious songs glorifying martyrdom. A total of five people around him, including his father and two cousins, have been detained for questioning.

Investigators are trying to reconstruct the last months of the life of Gorchene, 36, who was shot dead by an officer after killing Stéphanie M., a 49-year-old administrative official at the Rambouillet police station with a knife, and mothers of two. children.

The terrorist emigrated to France from his native Tunisia in 2009. He worked as a delivery man.

Last December he got a temporary residence permit for one year.

By then, the radicalization process was already underway This process coincided with the trial, between September and December, of the accomplices of the 2015 attack against the satirical weekly

Charlie Hebdo

, which had published cartoons of Muhammad, and with the beheading, for an 18-year-old Islamist, from high school teacher Samuel Paty on October 16.

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"His publications revealed, since the fall of 2020, an adherence to an ideology that legitimized violence against those who had offended the prophet," Prosecutor Ricard said in an appearance without questions.

"On October 24, 2020, a few days after the murder of Samuel Paty, the author was associated with a campaign to support the prophet in the face of the offenses that were allegedly committed against him."

The terrorist's father mentioned in the interrogations that he had observed "behavioral disorders" in his son at the beginning of the year, and another person who treated him in the same period found him "depressed", according to the prosecutor. Ricard added that on February 19, Gorchene went to the Rambouillet hospital psychiatric consultation, but "at this stage of the investigation, it does not appear that his condition required hospitalization or treatment." Between February 25 and March 13, he traveled to Tunisia.

On the Friday before the attack, Gorchene went to a prayer room in Rambouillet. In front of the entrance to the police station, he consulted on his mobile phone videos of songs that glorified martyrdom and jihad, according to Ricard. He took advantage of the fact that Stéphanie M. entered the police station to attack her and, while shouting “Allahu Akbar”, stabbing the 32-centimeter knife into her abdomen and neck. Next to the moped with which he was traveling, he found a copy of the Koran, and in his bag, a prayer mat.