Paris--A French prosecutor confirmed Tuesday that the man who beheaded his boss and tried to blow up a gas factory had a "terrorist motive" and links to the Islamic State group in Syria.
Yassin Salhi, 35, confessed to the crime but has maintained it was purely for personal reasons and had nothing to do with his religious beliefs, even though it bore all the hallmarks of a jihadist act.
"The one does not exclude the other and the choice to kill someone against whom he held a grudge does not exclude a terrorist motive," said Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins.
Molins pointed to several facts uncovered during the investigation, including links between Salhi and a known French jihadist in Syria, who asked permission from the Islamic State group to publish gruesome photos from the attack.
The 35-year-old Salhi, long known to security services for his radical views, was arrested Friday after an attack in which he rammed a delivery van laden with gas bottles 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.
"Yassin then tried to blow up gas bottles in what appears to be a martyr operation that could have left a large number of victims," he said, adding there were 75 people on site at the factory.
The first beheading in France during an attack shocked the country just six months after a three-day Islamist killing spree in Paris left 17 people dead, most of them gunned down in the editorial offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The prosecutor said Salhi had convinced Cornara, the owner of a delivery company for which he worked, to get into the van with him and later strangled him "with one hand".
He stopped some 500 metres before the factory in the town of Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the eastern city of Lyon and decapitated Cornara in the back of the van using a knife with a 25 cm blade.
Salhi had also bought a fake gun which he had taken pains to paint on the eve of the attack, showing careful preparation, said Molins.
AFP
