The man who stabbed four people to death in the Paris police headquarters was a convert to Islam enraged by a reprimand from a female colleague, according to reports.
IT worker Michael Harpon, 45, is said to have killed his female supervisor — who had previously reprimanded him for refusing to deal with women — with a ceramic blade, before going on to attack several other police personnel, leaving a total of four dead and one critically wounded before he was fatally shot in what has been described as a self-defence situation.
“I know this man. He worked in IT and he had long-running problems with his superior. He stabbed her first and then colleagues intervened and were stabbed as well. I am told he then got hold of a firearm,” confirmed Christophe Crépin, a spokesman for a French police union, confirmed in comments to The Telegraph.
The Paris prosecutor is treating the killings as ordinary crime rather than terrorism, although counter-terrorism officers have raided the home of Harpon, who was deaf and originally from Martinique in the Carribean, and arrested his wife Iham.
“An investigation has been launched into a grudge the assailant may have held against his colleagues, but terrorism cannot be ruled out,” according to a source quoted by MailOnline.
“Many of those involved in similar attacks on the police have been Muslim converts influenced by radical terrorist groups.”