French police hold five over deadly knife attack

PARIS: French police on Monday detained five people linked to a radicalised employee at the Paris police headquarters who killed four colleagues in a knife attack earlier this month, sources said.

Police staged raids at three locations in the northern suburbs of Paris, judicial sources and those close to the investigation said, confirming a report by the broadcaster RTL. Mickael Harpon, a 45-year-old computer expert, stabbed to death four colleagues at the police headquarters on October 3 before being shot and killed. It later emerged he had converted to Islam about 10 years ago and had started adopting increasingly radical beliefs.

One of the people detained Monday was an imam who preached at a mosque Harpon attended in Gonesse, who is on France´s "Fiche S" list of potential security risks, one source said. On Friday, the mayor of Gonesse announced that the Muslim association which employed the imam, who followed the hard-line Salafist branch of Islam, had dismissed him.

Investigators have found that Harpon, who had access to classified data within the Paris police´s intelligence division, had been in close contact with the imam in the months before his knife rampage.