A 34-year-old man in Bordeaux was arrested over the weekend after entering a police station and attacking officers while yelling death threats in the name of Allah.
The man, who was not identified by name, entered the police station around lunchtime Sunday wearing an armband inscribed with the word “Jihad” in Arabic script, French television broadcaster BFMTV reports.
The attack began almost immediately after the man entered the building and it took another officer to deploy his taser and electrocute the 34-year-old to subdue him while he shouted death threats at the officers.
No weapons were found on the suspect and he was soon placed in custody with the Bordeaux judicial police.
It is not clear whether or not he was on the French terror watchlist, known as the S-File, which has at least 25,000 individuals on it.
There are so many, that former agent of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), Yves Trotignon remarked, “We do not have the human means to follow all these people,” and asked politicians last year to provide more manpower and funding to keep track of those on the list.
The Bordeaux incident comes only days after a man suspected of being radicalised following a conversion to Islam in prison was arrested at a post office in the city of Angers for trying to have a sub-machine gun delivered to him through the postal service.
In the last several years, French police have often been the targets of Islamic radical terrorists including a case in 2016 in which members of Islamic State took credit for the brutal killing of a senior police officer and his wife in the Paris suburbs.
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, was stabbed to death outside his home by 25-year-old Larossi Abballa who had previously been convicted of offences related to terrorism.
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