It beggars belief that Mickaël Harpon was employed as a computer expert in the intelligence department at police HQ in Paris. It is also barely credible that when Christophe Castaner, France’s minister of the interior, addressed reporters hours after Harpon had murdered four of his colleagues on Thursday he didn’t know of his background. Castaner said that the perpetrator ‘has never given the slightest cause for concern’, yet on Saturday afternoon France’s anti-terror prosecutor described Harpon’s ‘radical vision of Islam’.
The 45-year-old had made no secret of where his allegiance lay. A convert to Islam more than a decade ago, Harpon first came to the attention of the authorities in 2015 when he defended the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and by extension, the murder of one of his colleagues, a Muslim officer, gunned down as he gallantly advanced towards the killers.
He was a terrorist apologist on other occasions and he was known to mix in Salafist circles.
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