2014 Tours police station stabbing

2014 Tours stabbing attack
Location of Indre-et-Loire within France
Location	Joué-lès-Tours
Date	December 20, 2014 (2014-12-20)
Target	Police officers
Attack type	Stabbing
Weapons	Knife
Deaths	1 (the perpetrator)
Non-fatal injuries	3
Perpetrator	Bertrand Nzohabonayo
Motive	Radical Islamism

On 20 December 2014, a man in Joué-lès-Tours near the city of Tours in central France entered a police station shouting the Islamic takbir Allahu Akbar ("God is Great"), and proceeded to attack officers with a knife, injuring three before he was shot and killed.

The stabbing attack is regarded by French authorities as an act of terrorism.^[1][2]

Perpetrator

The attacker was identified as Bertrand Nzohabonayo, age 20, a French citizen and former rap musician born in Burundi in 1994.^[3][4][5][6] The attacker had taken Bilal as his new name upon conversion to Islam, and had been posting Islamist material on his Facebook page, including a photograph of the black flag of the Islamic State.^[1][7]

The attacker's radical ideology had been reported to French security services before the attack.^[8]

In Burundi, a majority-Christian country, police arrested the attacker's brother, Brice Nzohabonayo, a man with known Islamist sympathies, and stated that they had informed French authorities that both brothers should be regarded as suspect due to their radical Islamist opinions.^[9]

Aftermath

Nzohabonayo, a recent convert to Islam, has been called the "first of the lone wolves," part of a "drumbeat" of Islamist attackers who struck France with acts of lone wolf terrorism in the weeks preceding the Charlie Hebdo shooting. These attacks began a month after ISIL released a video on 19 November 2014, in French, urging Muslims to carry out attacks against non-Muslims with vehicles.^{[1][10][11][12]}

This series of attacks included ones in Nantes and Dijon. Though the attacks occurred on three consecutive days, only the Joué-lès-Tours attack has been officially categorized as a terrorist attack.^[1] Although the three attacks were deemed unrelated with one another, the French government heightened the nation's security and deployed 300 soldiers to patrol the nation's streets.^[13]

See also

• 2014 Endeavour Hills stabbings
• 2014 Nantes attack
• 2014 Dijon attack
• January 2016 Paris police station attack

References