On 23 April 2021, 36-year-old Jamel Gorchene stabbed a police employee to death at a
police station
A police station is a facility operated by police or a similar law enforcement agency that serves to accommodate police officers and other law enforcement personnel. The role served by a police station varies by agency, type, and jurisdiction, ...
in
Rambouillet
Rambouillet (, , ) is a Subprefectures in France, subprefecture of the Yvelines Departments of France, department in the ÃŽle-de-France Regions of France, region of France. It is located beyond the outskirts of Paris, southwest of its Kilometr ...
, France.
Attack
At around 2:20pm on 23 April 2021 a fatal stabbing occurred in Rambouillet,
Yvelines
Yvelines () is a department in the western part of the ÃŽle-de-France region in Northern France. In 2019, it had a population of 1,448,207.Tunisian man who arrived in France illegally in 2009 who was not known to security services. He lived illegally in France for ten years until he obtained residency papers in 2020 which were valid until December 2021. He had recently moved to Rambouillet.
He was not previously known to Tunisian or French police services. His
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
posts were almost exclusively concerned with the defence of the
Muslim
Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...
community and
Islamophobia
Islamophobia is the irrational fear of, hostility towards, or hatred against the religion of Islam or Muslims in general. Islamophobia is primarily a form of religious or cultural bigotry; and people who harbour such sentiments often stereot ...
murder of Samuel Paty
On 16 October 2020, Samuel Paty (), a French Secondary education in France#Collège, secondary school teacher, was attacked and killed in Éragny, Val-d'Oise, Île-de-France, France, by an Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorist.
The perpetrator, A ...
, a teacher who showed depictions of Muhammed in class, Jamel Gorchene joined a campaign named (Respect Muhammed, prophet of God) and changed his Facebook profile picture. According to journalist
, since 2009 Jamel Gorchene had been the subject of slow but progressive radicalization which had escaped the notice of government surveillance agencies. He had been influenced by the radical teachings of Sheikh
Ali al-Qaradaghi
Sheikh Ali al-Qaradaghi (, born in Qaradagh, Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, Iraq) is an influential a Kurd, Kurdish Sunni scholar of Islam, an expert on Sharia and Fiqh combined with Islamic economics. He is a professor of Jurisprudence at the Facult ...
, whom he followed assiduously and retweeted.
Gorchene watched videos which glorified and encouraged martyrdom and jihad before his attack.
Coutances
Coutances () is a commune in the Manche department in Normandy in north-western France.
History
The capital of the Unelli, a Gaulish tribe, the town was given the name of ''Constantia'' in 298 during the reign of Roman Emperor Constantius ...
,
Normandy
Normandy (; or ) is a geographical and cultural region in northwestern Europe, roughly coextensive with the historical Duchy of Normandy.
Normandy comprises Normandy (administrative region), mainland Normandy (a part of France) and insular N ...
, and raised in
Montmartin-sur-Mer
Montmartin-sur-Mer is a commune in the Manche department in Normandy in north-western France.
See also
History of this charming small Normandy seaside town and local artist Felix Planquette*Communes of the Manche department
The following is ...
uniform
A uniform is a variety of costume worn by members of an organization while usually participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are most often worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency serv ...
Prime Minister
A prime minister or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. A prime minister is not the head of state, but r ...
Jean Castex
Jean Castex (; born 25 June 1965) is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 3 July 2020 to 16 May 2022. He was a member of The Republicans (LR) until 2020. Castex served for twelve years as mayor of the small town of ...
and
Interior Minister
An interior minister (sometimes called a minister of internal affairs or minister of home affairs) is a Cabinet (government), cabinet official position that is responsible for internal affairs, such as public security, civil registration and iden ...
visited the family of the victim.
An investigation into the attack was launched by the French (PNAT). Macron reaffirmed his opposition to
Islamic terrorism
Islamic terrorism (also known as Islamist terrorism, radical Islamic terrorism, or jihadist terrorism) refers to terrorist acts carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists.
Since at least the 1990s, Islami ...
.
National Rally
The National Rally (, , RN), known as the National Front from 1972 to 2018 (, , FN), is a French far-right politics, far-right political party, described as right-wing populist and French nationalism, nationalist. It is the single largest Nat ...
leader
Marine Le Pen
Marion Anne Perrine "Marine" Le Pen (; born 5 August 1968) is a French lawyer and politician of the far-right National Rally, National Rally party (RN). She served as the party's president from 2011 to 2021, and ran for the French presidency in ...
criticised the decision to grant French residency to an
illegal immigrant
Illegal immigration is the migration of people into a country in violation of that country's immigration laws, or the continuous residence in a country without the legal right to do so. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upward, wi ...