France admits ‘failings’ over Paris police attacker’s radicalization

PARIS — France’s interior minister acknowledges that officials should have kept a closer eye on the Paris police employee who stabbed four colleagues to death last week, after investigators found evidence he had supported an extreme version of Islam.

“Obviously, there were failings,” Christophe Castaner tells TF1 television, but he says he would not resign over the matter as some right-wing opponents have said he should.

Castaner has come under fire after initially claiming that Mickael Harpon, a 45-year-old computer expert at the Paris police headquarters, had never given the “slightest reason for alarm” ahead of Thursday’s attack.

Investigators later revealed that Harpon had in fact been in contact with adherents of Salafism, the ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam.

He had defended “atrocities committed in the name of that religion,” anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said yesterday.

Castaner says today that Harpon had caused alarm among his colleagues as far back as 2015, when he defended the massacre of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper by two brothers vowing allegiance to al-Qaeda.

But even though a police official charged with investigating suspected radicalization among the force questioned the colleagues, none of them wanted to file an official complaint.

“Apparently they decided not to make a report,” Castaner says. “The failure occurred at this moment.

Castaner will face questioning by parliament’s intelligence commission Tuesday over the attack, its president Christian Cambon says.

— AFP