A young man, formerly in a deradicalisation programme, was arrested after attacking police officers while armed with two knives in the department of Vaucluse, allegedly yelling “Allahu akbar”.
The attacker, 20-year-old Youssouf H., had entered a garden in the commune of Bollène on Wednesday shortly after 9 a.m. and tried to break down the door of a home with a planter.
A local alerted police and when two officers arrived, the man, armed with two knives, yelled, “Death to the cops! Allahu Akbar!” and attacked the pair, according to France Bleu.
While both police were protected by their bulletproof vests, one officer received some minor injuries. Police managed to subdue the attacker with a taser and take him into custody.
The 20-year-old was then handed over to the Avignon authorities. The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office has been notified of the incident, but so far has not taken up the investigation.
According to terrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard, the president of the Centre for the Analysis of Terrorism, the 20-year-old was part of a deradicalisation programme and that his brother was a well-known jihadist who had returned from Syria in 2017 and was sentenced to 7 years in prison.
This incident is not the first to see a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” target French police this year. In January, officers in Metz shot a knifeman in the leg to subdue him, with witnesses saying he yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the attack.
Days earlier, police in Paris shot another man yelling the same phrase while he stabbed several people, killing one.
In April, a Sudanese migrant yelling the Islamic war-cry murdered two people and stabbed and wounded five others in what was later described as a terrorist attack.
Since the murder of school teacher Samuel Paty in October, who was beheaded after showing cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed to his class, followed by the murder of multiple people in a Nice church, France has been on alert for potential terrorist attacks.
A report earlier this month revealed that since Paty’s murder there had been hundreds of incidents of praising terrorism across French schools, with nearly 400 from November 4th to the 30th alone.
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