DIn front of Marseille City Hall, on the Old Port, a Marseille municipal policeman was injured on Saturday March 12 by a man armed with a knife. The aggressor, neutralized by the police’s return fire, died of his injuries, we learned from a police source and the municipality.
The attack took place around 9 a.m. when this man attacked three municipal police officers, the assistant to security and the municipal police of the city of Marseille Yannick Ohanessian told AFP. The colleagues of the affected police officer “first responded with their non-lethal weapons, then one of the police officers responded with his lethal weapon”, mortally wounding the aggressor, he said. According to police union sources, they first used an electric pulse gun, then a defense ball launcher, before one of them finally used his service weapon. From the same source, the assailant was armed with a ceramic knife with a blade of about twenty centimeters.
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“The attacker is French”
At midday, traces of blood were still visible on the pavement near the town hall, behind a security cordon erected by the investigators. The body of the man, covered with a white sheet, was carried away at the end of the morning. According to the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, present in Marseille on Saturday morning for the inauguration of the future police station of the 13and and 14and boroughs, “the aggressor is French”: “For the moment, to my knowledge, he is not known to the police and he has no criminal record. “Present at his side, the socialist mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, clarified for his part that the attacker had attacked the injured policeman “several times” and that the municipal police officers targeted had made “several summonses” before using their weapons. No other details were given on the profile of this attacker.
Pending the conclusions of the investigation, Mr. Payan made a point of underlining “the very courageous gesture” of the police officer who defended his colleague: “I do not know what would have happened, probably, perhaps the worst. “From a police union source, the injured police officer would notably have a gash of five centimeters on one hand. He was transferred to the Timone hospital, and his two colleagues, “extremely shocked”, were taken to the psychiatric emergency room, said Mr. Ohanessian. “Apart from the shock, he is fine,” insisted Mr. Darmanin about the injured policeman.
On February 14, at Gare du Nord in Paris, another man was killed by two police officers from the Ile-de-France network brigade after he had threatened them with a knife with the anti-police slogan “All Cops are Bastards ” (“all cops are bastards”, Editor’s note). He was “a priori known to the police for wandering in the station”, according to the Minister Delegate for Transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari. The last police officer to die on duty in France is Brigadier Éric Masson, who was shot and killed at a narcotics point of sale in Avignon on May 5, 2021. The last fatal knife attack by a police officer dates back to April 23. 2021, when an administrative officer from the Rambouillet police station (Yvelines) was stabbed by a 36-year-old Tunisian national.