Target Police officers Deaths 1 (the perpetrator) Perpetrator Bertrand Nzohabonayo Date 20 December 2014 Attack type Stabbing | Weapons Knife Non-fatal injuries 3 Motive Possible Islamism Location Joué-lès-Tours, France Location Joué-lès-Tours | |
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Similar 2014 Dijon attack, 2014 Endeavour Hills stab, 2015 Thalys train attack, 2015 Saint‑Quentin‑Fallavier attack, 2014 Jewish Museum | ||
On 20 December 2014, a man in Joué-lès-Tours near the city of Tours in central France entered a police station shouting the Islamic takbir Allahu Akbar ("God is Great"), and proceeded to attack officers with a knife, injuring three before he was shot and killed.
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Perpetrator
The attacker was identified as Bertrand Nzohabonayo, age 20, a French citizen and former rap musician born in Burundi in 1994, he was known to the police for minor crimes but was not on any watchlist. The attacker had taken Bilal as his new name upon conversion to Islam, and had been posting Islamist material on his Facebook page, including a photograph of the black flag of the Islamic State.
In Burundi, police arrested the attacker's brother, Brice Nzohabonayo, a man with known Islamist sympathies, and claimed that they had informed French authorities the previous year that both brothers should be regarded as suspect due to their extreme religious views.
Aftermath
This attack, and others, were described by CNN as part of a "drumbeat of terror" which struck France in the weeks preceding the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
The attack was not officially categorized as a terrorist attack, though anti-terrorism investigators opened an inquiry. Following this attack and incidents in Nantes and Dijon, which were deemed unrelated to each other, the French government heightened the nation's security.