An attacker with suspected ties to French Islamic radicals rammed a car into a gas factory Friday in southeastern France. Photo / AP
An attacker with suspected ties to French Islamic radicals rammed a car into a gas factory Friday in southeastern France. Photo / AP
The man decapitated in an apparent Islamist attack on a chemical factory in south-eastern France was the assailant's boss, according to French reports, as police questioned the prime suspect's wife and sister.
The victim, named by French media as Hervé Cornara, 54, ran a delivery company authorised to enter the Air Products liquid gas factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, outsid Lyon, where the attack took place on Friday morning.
In what a police source called a "macabre mise en scene", the unnamed man's head was found attached to a fence outside the factory, far from the body inside the site.
Beside it was a black and flag with inscriptions in Arabic, thought to be those of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Yassin Salhi, 35, the man arrested inside the factory after smashing into liquid gas canisters causing an explosion and fire, managed to enter the sensitive site in a vehicle belonging to the company and which had security clearance to do so. According to security camera footage seen by AFP, he had first planted the head outisde before entering the plant.
"This was a terrorist attack given that a corpse was found decapitated and with inscriptions," said president François Hollande, who returned early from a European summit in Brussels to chair an emergency security meeting on Friday afternoon.
After ramming some gas tanks at "high speed", Salhi then got out of his vehicle and ran into a nearby building to try and open the valves of more liquid gas bottles, in a bid to spark a far bigger explosion.
However, one of two firemen called to the scene tackled the suspect to the floor as he shouted "Alahou Akbar" (God is Greatest).
Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, called the fireaman's act one of extreme "bravery and sang-froid". Salhi suffered superficial facial injuries in the struggle.
Salhi, 35, of North African origin from Saint Priest in eastern Lyon, has "no criminal record", according to Mr Cazeneuve. He was listed in 2006 as a Salafist "radical", but went off the radar in 2008. According to RTL, intelligence agents voiced alarm about his "radicalism" as recently as last year.
Police said that a person "close to" the arrested suspect was detained suspected of conducting "reconnaissance" at the site before the attack, but later released.
The suspect's sister and wife were also taken in for questioning. Beforehand, the wife expressed total ignorance and shock on Europe 1 radio, saying her husband was at work, apparently doing deliveries.
"My heart is going to stop. I don't know what has happened. Have they arrested him?" she asked.
"He went to work this morning at 7am. He does deliveries. He did not return between noon and two, I expect him this afternoon.
"My sister said turn on the television. She was crying," said the young woman.
"I know my husband. We have a normal family life. He goes to work, he comes back," she said.
"We are normal Muslims. We do Ramadan. We have three children and a normal family life," said the wife of the suspect.
Shocked neighbours said the Salhi, his wife and three children aged six to nine were "very discreet". They had arrived in the district around six months ago.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve answers reporters after an attack took place. Photo / AP
Police officers investigate at a plant where the attack took place. Photo / AP
There remain question marks over whether the assailant had acted alone
The Salhi family lived quietly on the ground floor of a four-storey social housing block in a mixed area of council estates and private detached houses in this quiet village on the edge of Lyon.
Neighbour Lassaad Ben Hassine, 48, said he often bumped into Mr Salhi on the street.
"He always sais hello but he never mixed much with the local people," he td the Telegraph. " The family was very solitary. But his kids played with mine. I'm astonished to hear this news."
He said the suspect's wife left the house only to take the cours le's three children to school. Officials said the children, two girls amd a boy, were now in the care of local authorities.
Other neighbours in this community, which has a large proprtion of people of north African origin, also said the Salhi family were reserved and kept to themselves.
The mayor of St Priest, Gilles Gascon of Nicolas Sarkozy's Republicans party, said he was angry that the suspect had been dropped from a watch list by intelligence services in 2008.
"People like that should not be left at large," he said, criticising what he said were the "gaps" in the security measures put in place by President François Hollande's Socialist government after terror attacks in Paris in January .
One young local Muslim man was furious after hearing news of the attack.
"To carry out such an attack on a Friday during the holy month of Ramadan is not respectful of Islam," said Mehdi, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian parents.
"These people may say they are Muslims but they are not," said Mehdi, who was dressed in a long white dejellaba and who said he lived around 100 yards from the scene of the attack.
"I am angry. They have no right to set off bombs beside our homes where our children live."
Mr Hollande said: "The attack carried out by one person, perhaps accompanied by someone else rammed at high speed this establishment, which is classified and contains gas tanks. The intention leaves no room for doubt: it was to provoke an explosion. This was a terrorist attack given that a corpse was found decapitated and with inscriptions."
Saying he expressed "solidarity" with the victim, who according to a security source was of "European" descent, saying that the attack was all the more painful given the Islamist attacks of January in Paris in which 17 were killed, which rocked the nation.
"Everyone remembers what happened in our country, and not only in our country, and there is emotion," he said.
"But emotion cannot be the only response: we need action, prevention dissuasion and the necessity to carry our values and never give in to fear."
He said "all necessary precautions" had been taken to ward against any other attacks and that France's "vigipirate" terror plan had been put on maximum alert in the Rhône area.
Manuel Valls, the prime minister, who is on a tour of South America, called on sensitive sites in the Rhône-Alpes region to remain "highly vigilant" in case of follow-up attacks.
"France has been struck again by terror," says Mr Valls, who is cutting short the trip to return to Paris.
"The terrorists' threats and blind horrors spare no nation. My thoughts go to the victims of Isère and the victims in Tunisia (where 27 people were gunned down by Islamists on Friday)," he said from Colombia.
Patrick Menucci, Socialist MP of the Bouches-du-Rhône area, was far more blunt. "France is at war," said the man who led a recent parliamentary inquiry into jihadist networks.
"I know it's not good to say so, but this terror attack in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier is the proof," he told Le Monde.
"We have on our territory individuals who don't obey the laws of the Republic but fatwas of the Islamic State," said Mr Menucci, two months after the Senate issued figures suggesting that half of all Europeans having left the continent to wage jihad in the Middle East were French.
In all 1,683 French nationals are in some way implicated in the fighting - a 203 per cent increase in the number in a year.
Mr Menuccis said while he was "horrified" by the attack, he wasn't "surprised".
"In the parliaementary report...we warned of the risks of attack. France is the most threatened country in Europe, notably because it defends secularism."
Mr Cazeneuve recently said that 278 French nationals had left Syria, of which 213 have already returned to France and others were returning each week and even on a daily basis.
Last month the French PM warned that France could be at risk of these kind of suicide attacks being replicated on French soil and pointed that at least six of French nationals who had undertaken the kamikaze raids were recent converts to Islam.
Mr Menucci said in this case it appeared the attacker was not a returning jihadi but part of a "sleeper cell", like Mohammed Merah, the Toulouse killer.
He said the difficulty was knowing whether such people had any "real links" with Isil or were "connected via internet and decide to follow on their own iniative the fatwa, which I remind people calls on them to strike France and the French".
It is unclear why the Air Products factory, a US-based company, was targeted. It is classified as a "low level" site under the EU Seveso classification. This means that it is carries industrial risks but that the quantity of hazardous material remains limited.
