A French national with a prior terrorism conviction and ties to jihadists based in Pakistan murdered two police officials outside Paris Monday night in what the country's interior minister called "an abject terrorist act".
Most shockingly, French officials revealed Tuesday that the suspected assailant, 25-year-old Larossi Abbala, had filmed the attack and posted it on Facebook Live.
An off-duty police commander was attacked and stabbed multiple times in the abdomen outside his home in Magnanville, about 35 miles west of the French capital. The assailant then retreated indoors and held the officer's partner, reportedly a secretary at a local police station, and their three-year-old son hostage, setting up a standoff that lasted roughly three hours.
The boy was taken to safety after commandos stormed the home, but the woman was found dead. Officials said the attacker was killed by police when they stormed the residence.
"The toll is a heavy one," Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told reporters at the scene, his voice heavy with emotion.
Abbala, from the weste Paris suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie, was sentenced in 2013 to three years in prison, including six months suspended, for association with a terrorist enterprise.
The Islamic State's Amaq news agency cited an uamed "source" as saying an ISIS fighter carried out the attack, but the extremist jihadist group has not officially claimed responsibility.
French media, some of them citing uamed neighbors, reported that the attacker was heard shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is Great" — during the attack.
Speaking after an emergency meeting convened Tuesday moing by French President Francois Hollande, Interior Minister Beard Cazeneuve said more than 100 people seen as potential threats have been arrested in France this year, including in recent weeks.
Cazeneuve also waed that the threat of terrorism "is high in France, it's high in Europe, it's high in the Weste world as shown by the events that happened 48 hours ago in the United States," a reference to the attack on an Orlando night club early Sunday.
Hollande himself said Monday's murders were "incontestably a terrorist act and waed that France was facing a terror threat "of a very large scale."
France, like other countries in Europe, has seen a series of stabbings aimed at police officers or soldiers and carried out by Muslim radicals. ISIS has encouraged its supporters to stage such attacks.
"Today every police officer is a target," Yves Lefebvre of police union Unite SGP Police-FO told The Associated Press, adding that attackers are "professionalizing" and can now find police in their homes.
Cazeneuve said Tuesday that police officers would now be allowed to take their service weapons home.
France has been under a state of emergency since a series of co-ordinated shootings and bombings by ISIS terrorists killed 130 people in Paris this past November. The country is currently hosting the European soccer championship, and stadiums and other public places are under tight security.
There was no indication that the murders would affect either of the two matches scheduled to take place Tuesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.