French prosecutor confirms IS link to factory beheading

Paris, June 30 

A French prosecutor confirmed today that the man who beheaded his boss and tried to blow up a gas factory in Lyon had a “terrorist motive” and links to the Islamic State group in Syria.

The investigation “indicates a terrorist motive in Yassin Salhi’s act, even though it is justified by personal considerations,” said Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins.

The 35-year-old, long known to security services for his radical views, was arrested Friday after an attack in which he rammed his gas-filled delivery van into a warehouse containing dangerous chemicals, causing an explosion.

Firefighters alerted by the blast found him trying to open gas bottles inside the Air Products factory, shouting “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest), before making the grisly discovery of the severed head of Salhi’s 54-year-old boss Herve Cornara.

“Salhi decapitated his victim, he hung the head on a fence to get maximum publicity, as he told us during interrogation,” said Molins.

The prosecutor said that Salhi claimed to have strangled his boss “with one hand” before stopping 500 metres before the factory to decapitate him with a knife with a 25 cm blade. The head was attached to the fence with a chain and surrounded by two Islamic flags which Salhi said he had bought the night before the attack.

“This corresponds very precisely to the orders of Daesh (the Islamic State) which calls regularly for acts of terrorism on French soil and in particular to cut the throats of unbelievers. —  AFP