Headless body, scrawled with Arabic, found at French blast site

SAINT-QUENTIN FALLAVIER, FRANCE | BY CATHERINE LAGRANGE-Fri Jun 26, 2015

A decapitated body daubed with Arabic writing was found at a U.S.-owned factory in southeast France on Friday after an assailant rammed a delivery van into gas containers at the site, triggering an explosion.

A source close to the investigation said the victim was the boss of the suspect, a delivery man. The two had gone to the company to make a delivery but the assailant killed and beheaded his 50-year-old manager before entering the secured site in the vehicle.

The attacker was injured in the blast and arrested on the site. His wife was later taken into custody and authorities were questioning at least one other suspected accomplice.

Speaking from a European Union summit in Brussels, French President Francois Hollande described it as a terrorist attack and said all measures would be taken to stop any future strikes on a country still reeling from Islamist assaults in January.

 

Referring to a separate gun attack at a hotel in Tunisia which killed 28 people and a suicide attack in Kuwait that killed 25, Hollande called for nations to work together to combat security threats.

"There is no other link other than to say that terrorism is our common enemy," he told reporters on his return to Paris.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve named the suspect as Yassin Sahli. He said Sahli did not have a criminal record but had been under surveillance from 2006 to 2008 on suspicion of having become radicalised by Islamist associates.

The attack happened at an industrial zone near the town of Saint-Quentin Fallavier to the south of the city of Lyon. Its air, rail and road links have made it one of Europe's major logistics hubs, with through-traffic of 5,000 trucks a day.

Sources close to the investigation said Sahli was a 35-year-old professional driver who lived in the Lyon suburbs. Europe 1 radio interviewed a woman they identified as his wife.

"In the morning he left for work and didn’t come home between noon and 2:00, I was waiting for him," she told Europe 1 radio, saying she and her family of three children lived normal lives as Muslims. "My heart is about to give out."

French BFMTV television filming outside Sahli's apartment showed pictures of police leading out a woman, her head covered by a blanket, into a waiting car. It said forensic police were carrying out searches on the ground-floor apartment of the modern, concrete apartment block.

The attack, which wounded two other people with the blast, underlined again the difficulty for authorities across Europe and elsewhere of protecting so-called "soft" targets against strikes by assailants operating by themselves or in small undercover cells.

ISLAMIST FLAG

Police sources earlier said the decapitated body was discovered at the site, along with a flag bearing Islamist inscriptions.