French detectives are questioning a police officer about the double murder of a police commander and his partner by a convicted Islamist terrorist.
France’s anti-terrorist brigade took three men and three women into custody on Monday in connection with the fatal knife attack on Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his partner, Jessica Schneider, in June 2016.
According to multiple reports in French media, one of the suspects being questioned is a police major who was arrested with her allegedly radicalised daughter and members of their entourage.
Le Monde and L’Express magazine cited sources naming the officer as Maryline Bereaud, 48, a former delegate for Alliance, the French police officers’ main trade union. There was no suggestion that she was directly implicated in the killings.
L’Express alleged that Bereaud had been at the subject of an internal police inquiry in 2016 after she was said to have allowed a young woman on the fiche S list of people considered a potential security risk to stay at her home. The investigation cleared Bereaud of any wrongdoing, but she was asked to resign from her union role.
At about the same time, she was promoted to major and has since been working in an administrative retention centre for illegal immigrants in Plaisir.
On Monday, police said an investigating judge had signed the order for the six people from the Yvelines department, in Paris’s western suburbs, to be taken into custody.
A police source told L’Express: “We have to remain careful; these people are presumed innocent. By taking them into custody, we aim to shine some light on a still unanswered question: why was the Salvaing-Schneider couple targeted by Larossi Abballa?”
Larossi Abballa, who declared his allegiance to Islamic State, stabbed Salvaing, 42, a deputy police commander, then slit the throat of Schneider, 36, a police administrator, in front of the couple’s three-year-old son.
Abballa, 25, who had previously been convicted of taking part in a jihadist recruitment network, streamed a video of the attack on the family home in a quiet residential area of Magnanville, 34 miles (55km) west of Paris, on Facebook Live.
Police negotiators attempted to talk to the man, who said he was a soldier for Isis and had sworn allegiance to the group. Holed up inside the house with the couple’s toddler son, with police attempting to negotiate with him, Abballa indicated that he knew the murdered police commander, the French daily Libération reported. “He came to my home, now I’ve come to his,” it reported him as saying.
Abballa was killed as special forces stormed the property.
The then French president François Hollande described the killings as “odious” and “undeniably a terrorist attack”.
In 2013, Abballa, who was French, was sentenced to three years in prison, with six months suspended, for “criminal association in view to preparing terrorist attacks” for his role in a recruitment network of jihadists to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was freed in September 2013 after serving most of his sentence on remand.
Before then, he was known to police for crimes including theft and violence. In 2009, he was convicted of theft for stealing €157 (£137) from a hairdresser’s till.
Three men are under official investigation for links to the attack, two of them for “association with terrorist criminals” and one for “complicity to murder public servants in connection with a terrorist organisation”. The third man’s DNA was found on a laptop used by Abballa inside the house to claim responsibility for the double murder.
