A female employee of the police in the city of Rambouillet near Paris was stabbed to death on her way back from her lunch break by an Islamist terrorist who shouted “Allahu Akbar!” during the attack.
The victim was a 49-year-old mother of two. She was stabbed in the throat twice and died a short time afterward.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that the country would “never give in” to Islamist terrorism.
“In our fight against Islamist terrorism, we will never give in,” Macron wrote on Twitter in response to the murder, identifying the victim as “Stephanie.”
(Google translation: “She was a police officer. Stéphanie was killed in her Rambouillet police station, on the already damaged land of Yvelines. The Nation is at the side of her family, her colleagues, and the police. In the fight against Islamist terrorism, we will not give up.”
Police raided the terrorist’s home in Ramboulliet shortly after the attack. The police also searched another man’s home, a place where the suspect stayed when he first came to France, apparently illegally. He obtained a valid residency card that was set to expire later this year.
Over the past year, France has seen a number of attacks that trace back to radical Islam.
They included a suspect from Pakistan wounding two people with a meat cleaver in September, a Chechen refugee beheading a teacher [on] Oct. 16, a Tunisian national stabbing three people [on] Oct. 29, and a police employee tied to radical Islam who fatally stabbed three officers and another police employee in October 2019, France 24 reported.
Those attacks followed a series of horrific larger-scale attacks: the January 2015 massacre of employees at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the November 2015 multi-site attacks at bars, restaurants and entertainment and sports venues that left 130 people dead and 350 wounded.