Foreign Desk Report
Paris: A man who used a knife to attack officers in a French police barracks was a trainee soldier, officials said, in the second case in four months of a violent assault by someone from within France’s security services.
The assailant in Monday evening’s attack, at a barracks in Dieuze in eastern France, wounded one officer in the hand. Police shot and wounded the knifeman, who is now in hospital.
Shortly before the attack, a call was placed to the police from someone saying he was in the armed forces and was preparing an attack in Dieuze in the name of the militant Islamic State (IS) group, French media cited local prosecutors as saying.
In October last year, Mickael Harpon, an information technology assistant at police headquarters in central Paris, went on a knife rampage inside the building, killing four people before being shot dead.
