French anti-terror police are continuing to question Yassin Salhi, the French lorry driver who decapitated his boss before ramming a vehicle into a chemical plant near Lyon, after it emerged that he sent a macabre selfie to a contact in Syria.
Salhi, 35, used the instant messaging service WhatsApp to send a picture of himself posing with the severed head of his victim to an account registered to a Canadian telephone number.
The number belongs to a French national, known by his first name, Sebastien-Younes, who has been in Syria since last year. His last known location was the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa and it is thought he is fighting for Isis.
Salhi has confessed to murdering his boss but his motives remain unclear.He told detectives he had killed Hervé Cornara in a car park before arriving at the plant in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, 18 miles (30km) south of Lyon, where he attempted to cause an explosion on Friday.
Several French media groups reported that during questioning Salhi had been confused as to the motives behind the attack, citing issues with his family and his job.
The TV news channel iTele said Salhi had told police he had wanted to kill himself and stage a media coup by dressing it up as a terrorist act. The news channel said Salhi had told police he had acted alone.
Days before the attack, he was reported to have fallen out with Cornara, 54, the manager of the transport company where he had been employed on a permanent contract since March.
“We don’t know whether we’re dealing with a fundamentalist who flipped or a real terrorist,” one source close to the investigation told Reuters. “Investigators are wondering whether this isn’t just a simple criminal act.”
On Friday morning, Salhi, a married father of three, had rammed his van into the US-owned Air Products chemical factory in what President François Hollande said was a “terrorist” attack designed to blow up the building.
He was overpowered by a firefighter as he was trying to prise open a bottle of acetone in an apparent suicidal bid to destroy the factory.
Police then found Cornara’s severed head tied to the gates of the factory near two flags on which were written the Muslim profession of faith. The victim’s headless body was found by the van with a knife and a fake pistol lying nearby.
A postmortem examination on Cornara has proved inconclusive, with experts unable to determine whether he was killed before his head was cut off. More tests were being carried out.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Searches on Salhi’s home did not find any weapons, propaganda or evidence of accomplices.
Salhi was born in the Doubs in north-eastern France to parents of Moroccan and Algerian descent. His father died when he was a teenager. About a decade ago, Salhi is known to have had contact with a Muslim convert, Frederic Jean Salvi, known as “Ali”, who was suspected of preparing attacks in Indonesia with al-Qaida militants.
Salhi was placed under “discreet” police surveillance in 2006 because of his contact with Salvi, but that ended in 2008 because, according to the French interior ministry, he “was not known to be in contact with terrorist actors”. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said Salhi had been investigated over links to radical Salafists in Lyon, but was not known to have taken part in terrorist activities and did not have a criminal record.
French media cited Salhi’s former martial arts instructor as saying the otherwise calm man was subject to such outbursts of rage that other pupils would refuse to spar with him.
The attack has revived concerns about terrorism in France less than six months after the deadly Paris attacks on the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
The Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, said on Sunday the world was engaged in a war against terrorism. He told iTele: “We cannot lose this war because it’s fundamentally a war of civilisation. It’s our society, our civilisation that we are defending.” He added that France was facing “a major terrorist threat” that needed to be fought over the long term. It was not a question of whether there will be another attack, but when and where, he said.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing opposition party, Les Républicains, said it was glad Valls had adopted the right’s terminology of a “war of civilisation”. Valls added that 5,000 Europeans were fighting alongside jihadis in conflicts across the world, and that by the end of this year there could be 10,000 Europeans fighting for Isis.
source : abna
