French police kill armed man in Charlie Hebdo anniversary attack
French police shot dead a man carrying a meat cleaver as he attempted to enter a police station in the capital, Paris, on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack. The man approached a police station in the Goutte d’Or area of the city, reportedly shouted Allah Akbar (God is great), was carrying a mobile phone, and held a piece of paper bearing an image of ISIS’s flag with claims of responsibility by the militant group written in Arabic. He also wore what turned out to be a fake suicide belt. The incident, which is reportedly being investigated as an act of terrorism, occurred at 11.30am, a year to the minute since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Police have not confirmed the man’s identity but news reports suggest that he was Sallah Ali, a homeless man who was born in Morocco in 1995. France remains in a state of emergency following the 13 November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

The French capital was once again forced to nervous high alert on Thursday after officers shot dead a man who tried to enter a police station in Paris wielding a meat cleaver and wearing a fake suicide vest on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack.



The man was carrying a piece of paper marked with the Islamic State flag and an “unequivocal” claim of responsibility hand-written in Arabic, the Paris prosecutor said.

Investigators matched his fingerprints to those on file for a man convicted of theft in 2013. At that time he was homeless and had identified himself as Sallah Ali, born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1995, a source close to the investigation told AFP. But police had not yet officially confirmed the man’s identity.

The man approached the police station in the Goutte d’Or area, in Paris’s northern 18th arrondissement, between the Gare du Nord train station and the Sacre Coeur cathedral, at 11.30am – one year almost to the minute since the gun massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo which left 12 people dead.

Dressed in jeans and a padded jacket, he brandished a butcher’s knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar”, before being shot by police, the prosecutor said. Police union representatives said officers outside the police station had ordered the man to stop as he approached. But he continued towards them and reached into his jacket, so they fired.

The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said the officers had been “obliged to open fire”.

Bomb disposal teams rushed to the site after the man was seen to be wearing a pouch under his coat with a wire hanging from it. The area was sealed off and residents were told to close windows and stay away from balconies. Two nearby schools were closed with the children inside, as a precaution. But the device was found to be a fake and contained no explosives. The man, who had acted without covering his face, was carrying a mobile phone but no identification papers.

The incident is being investigated as a terrorist “attempted murder” of public officials in authority, the prosecutor said.

The attempted meat cleaver attack came just as the French president, François Hollande, was making a speech to security forces in a ceremony on the other side of the city at the Paris police HQ to mark the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings.



Francois Holland speech on terrorism. Guardian

The sombre commemorations have been accompanied by questions over potential security failings.

On 7 January 2015, the offices of Charlie Hebdo were invaded by two French brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who opened fire with Kalashnikovs killing 12 people, including some of France’s best known satirical cartoonists. The magazine was a known target supposedly under heavy state protection.

The brothers then shot dead a police officer in the street before fleeing Paris by car and resurfacing two days later to take hostages at a printer’s premises outside the capital.

On 8 January, their accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, shot dead a policewoman in the south of Paris and the next day killed four people in a bloody hostage-taking at a kosher grocery.

The three-day killing spree by men born raised and radicalised in France stunned the country and led to soul-searching about the state of French society and the ability of security services to keep tabs on known jihadi suspects.



Yet only 10 months later, on 13 November, Paris suffered its deadliest terrorist attacks since the second world war when 130 people were killed as gunmen and suicide bombers targeted Paris bars, a rock gig at the Bataclan concert hall, and the national stadium.

Most of the men who carried out the January and November attacks were known to French security services. Several had either travelled abroad to fight with Islamist jihadi or had been prevented from doing so.

The widow of the police protection officer, Franck Brinsolaro, who died at Charlie Hebdo’s offices while on duty guarding the editor-in-chief, Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), filed a legal complaint this week over security failings.

“For me, Franck was sacrificed,” she told French radio. “He saw the dysfunction, he rued the lack of security at the offices, he said people could slip through.”

This week the paper Le Canard Enchaîné reported testimony to police saying that three months before the Charlie Hebdo attack a worker in the building had seen a man he later identified as Chérif Kouachi. Kouachi, in a car outside the building, had told him to warn the newspaper’s team about criticising the prophet Muhammed and said “we’re watching them”.

Charlie Hebdo’s police protection officers passed the account to their superiors but it was not clear if the information was properly dealt with by the authorities.

Likewise, Le Monde this week obtained the police testimony of a jihadi who returned to France from Syria in June 2015 and was interviewed by police. He said the man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud – who would later coordinate part of the 13 November attacks, including the gun massacre at the Bataclan rock gig – had spoken to him about “finding an easy target, a concert for example, where there are [a lot of] people”. He said Abaaoud had said: “Imagine a rock concert in a European country, if we gave you arms, would you be prepared to fire into the crowd?” This testimony to police came five months before the Bataclan was attacked in exactly this manner.

Documentaries to mark the anniversary have highlighted internal rivalries within security and intelligence services; it could mean the services might not have been properly sharing information.

In his speech to the security forces Hollande hinted at intelligence failings that might have allowed the Charlie Hebdo attacks to take place, as he called for all branches of the security services to cooperate more closely. “Faced with these adversaries, it is essential that every service – police, gendarmerie, intelligence, military – work in perfect harmony, with the greatest transparency, and that they share all the information at their disposal.”

Hollande is taking a hard line on security issues. The government intends to give more powers to police, including increased rights to carry weapons, more powers to stop and search people and to search homes without oversight by judges. Some magistrates have complained that the measures transfer too much power from the judicial investigations process to the police.

The political stakes are high for Hollande in the run up to next year’s presidential election. He was the least popular French president on record before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and is now trying to rebuild his presidential image.

The French political debate is now more than ever focusing on issues of national identity. Hollande is under fire within his own Socialist party, accused of appropriating the ideas of the far-right by proposing to strip French citizenship from citizens with dual nationality convicted of terrorist crimes.