Beheading near Lyons related to jihadist activities, French police says.
Last week’s jihadi-style murder and attempted suicide attack near Lyon were part of a wider terror operation according to French police. Jewish institutions have taken extra security measures nationwide. So have churches and industrial facilities.
The Lyon case reads much like a gore movie script. On June 26, Yassin Salih, 35, killed and beheaded his boss, Hervé Cornara, 54, at a parking lot near the Air Products chemical factory at Saint-Quentin-Pallavier near Lyons.
Posturing as an Islamic State (Isis) executioner – his victim’s head at his feet – he shot a selfie and fowarded it through WhatsApp to a friend who had actually joined Isis in Syria. He then hung Cornara’s head at the factory’s railings, in between two Isis black flags. Finally, he attempted drive a truck into a shed filled up with gas bottles, in order to cause a major conflagration, but was intercepted in due time by the local fire brigade.
The barbarically staged crime elicited as much furor as awe in France. A graphic example of how many people felt about it is the headline of Liberation, the liberal daily newspaper, on the following day : « Jihad Nauseam » (a pun on « jihad » and the Latin expression « ad nauseam »). The National Council of the French Muslim Religion issued a formal condemnation.
Cornara’s assassination and beheading occured almost six months after the massacres at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket in Paris, which claimed twenty victims. Moreover, two major Isis-related terror attacks took place on the same day in other countries : an automatic rifle massacre of Western tourists at a beach hotel in Sousse, Tunisia (37 dead and at least as many wounded), and a suicide bombing at a shiite mosque in Kuwait City, Kuwait (27 dead and 222 wounded).
President François Hollande convened on Friday evening the ministers and officials in charge of home security for a special cabinet meeting. Vigipirate, the state of emergency under which France has been living for years, has been upgraded again to its maximum level.
It seems that Yassin Salih quarreled with Cornara for professional reasons two days before killing him. Cornara, the manager of a delivery company, was said to be a warm and generous person. Still, he grew angry at Salih when he damaged valuable computer material.
According to further reports, Salih might have been as well in the middle of a domestic crisis. His wife might have threatened to divorce him.
Nevertheless, the French police believes the evidence for a terrorist operation is overwhelming. Salih, a French Muslim of North African descent, was involved with jihadist cells since 2006. The friend to whom he forwarded the beheading selfie – known so far as Sébastien-Younes V. – is a French-Algerian extremist who left for Syria last November, along with his wife and an 18 months child.
Both men seem to have been influenced by Frederic Jean Salvi, aka Ali or the Great Ali, a French drug dealer who converted to islam while in jail and subsequently organized a salafist underground mosque in Pontarlier, Eastern France – Salih’s place of birth.
According to police sources and security analysts, Salih’s real assignment might have been to initiate a conflagration at the gas depot which, in turn, would have developed into a massive environmental and public health disaster. The area where the Air Products factory is located is classified as an high risk zone in terms of chemical accidents ( a « Seveso zone », under EU regulations, by reference to the 1976 catastrophe in Seveso, Italy). It is unclear whether Cornara’s murder was part of the plan or was just a last minute addition to settle a personal feud.
Sources believe that further terrorist attacks may occur in France at any moment and that targets are many. Jews or Israelis are clearly on the frontline. But so are the French army or police forces, or industrial facilities, or Christian places of worship. Ten weeks ago, the French police arrested a jihadist militant who was about to attack one or several Catholic churches in the Essonne county, south of Paris.
© Michel Gurfinkiel, 2015