Thu 03 October 2019:
An employee at police headquarters in Paris has stabbed and killed four officers before being shot dead.
He reportedly stabbed a colleague in his office with a ceramic knife before turning it on others, at least one of them a woman, with the last attacked in the courtyard outside.
He was shot dead by a police officer who was also seriously injured in the attack in the historic building near Notre Dame Cathedral.
The Île de la Cité area was closed off by police and the nearby Cité metro station was sealed off.
The motive for the attack, which happened at about 1pm in a part of the police prefecture not open to the public, is not known.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, the interior minister, Christophe Castener, and the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, were at the scene. Macron was expected to go ahead with his scheduled public debate on pensions reform in the southern town of Rodez on Thursday night.
The man, who had worked at the prefecture on the Île de la Cité for 20 years, had security clearance at the building. Loic Travers, a union official, said he was unaware of any problems that could have pushed this “ordinary administrator” to kill his colleagues.
“The four victims were police officers. There is a chaotic atmosphere in the prefecture … obviously it’s shocking. The colleagues who saw what happened will be marked by this for the rest of their careers.”
Emery Siamandi, a prefecture employee, said: “I was on the stairs when I heard shots and thought it was not normal. After I saw three police officers crying and other colleagues crying. At first I thought a police officer had killed himself afterwards I learned it someone had killed the officers. The officer who killed the man was crying.”
The area around the police headquarters was completely sealed off.
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