Cop murdered during Euro 16: ISIS claims responsibility, Hollande calls action

Paris: French President Francois Hollande called the killing of a policeman and his partner by a man claiming allegiance to Islamic State (IS) a "terrorist act" and warned France still faced a serious threat.

The attack is the first deadly strike in France since the coordinated attacks on Paris by an Islamic State cell in November in which 130 people were killed. Hollande said the 42-year-old policeman and his partner, who were attacked at their home northwest of Paris overnight, were "murdered in cowardly fashion." "It's unquestionably a terrorist act," Hollande said, stressing that France, which is currently hosting the Euro 2016 football championships was still "facing a very significant terrorist threat."

Sources close to the investigation identified the suspect, who was killed in a police raid, as Larossi Abballa and said he was convicted in 2013 over his role in a jihadist group with links to Pakistan. The sources later confirmed that the 25-year-old assailant was also part of a more recent investigation into a network recruiting jihadists for the fight in Syria. During failed negotiations with police that ended with elite RAID officers storming the house, the attacker claimed he was also acting on behalf of IS. He repeatedly stabbed the policeman and then killed his partner, who was found with knife wounds to her neck.

The couple's three-year-old son was found after the police operation, "in shock but unharmed," a prosecutor added.

A suspected Islamist attacker stabbed a French police commander to death outside his home and later killed his partner in an attack claimed by Islamic State and denounced by the government as "an abject act of terrorism".

The attacker, a 25-year-old who went to jail in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan and had been monitored by security services, repeatedly knifed the 42-year-old commander in the stomach late on Monday.

He then barricaded himself inside the house in Magnanville, a suburb some 60 km west of Paris, taking the policeman's partner and three-year-old son hostage. His partner, an administrative police official, was found dead in the house. The boy was unharmed but in a state of shock, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The man, whom police and justice sources named as Larossi Abballa, was shot dead by members of an elite police unit after negotiations failed.

"An abject act of terrorism was carried out yesterday in Magnanville," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after an emergency government meeting, before heading out to Les Mureaux, where the police commander worked.

If it is confirmed Islamic State was behind the murders, it would be the first militant strike on French soil since the government imposed a state of emergency after multiple attacks on Paris in November that killed 130 people.

Islamic State's claim that one of its "fighters" carried out the evening attack came a day after the Islamist militant group said it was responsible for the shooting that killed 49 people in a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Searches were being carried out on Tuesday morning at the attacker's house and in other places, a judicial source said. "Many things are being analysed," the source said, including messages posted on social networks.

The police commander's partner was also killed with a knife, the source said, but declined to give any more details. Larossi was born in France, said the source.

Larossi was given a three-year prison sentence in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan. His name had come up in an ongoing investigation about a man who left for Syria, but he was not considered a threat, another source close to the investigation said.

Officials have not revealed the identity of the 42-year-old officer.