Jihadist Commits Suicide

 

LONDON — A 35-year-old French deliveryman who beheaded his boss and then set off an explosion at an American-owned chemical plant near Lyon in June killed himself in his prison cell, officials said on Wednesday.

The man, Yassin Salhi, hanged himself on Tuesday evening in his cell in an isolation unit at a prison in the southern Paris suburb of Fleury-Mérogis, said Sylvaine Villeneuve, a spokeswoman for the Justice Ministry, in an email.

Mr. Salhi faced charges of murder, terrorism and involvement with Islamic State extremists, and on Tuesday morning, he was informed that his detention, scheduled to last until Jan. 4, would be extended by six months.

He had not been identified as a suicide risk, Ms. Villeneuve said.

The attack on June 26, nearly six months after an attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, further unnerved France. It occurred on the same day that Islamist extremists killed dozens of people at a hotel in Sousse, Tunisia, and at a mosque in Kuwait.

Mr. Salhi, who lived in a suburb of Lyon, in southeastern France, lured his boss, Hervé Cornara, 54, into the back of a utility truck, knocked him unconscious with a car jack, and strangled him, the French authorities said.

He then drove the truck toward the Air Products chemical plant in St.-Quentin-Fallavier, a small town outside Lyon, but stopped nearby and decapitated Mr. Cornara.

Mr. Salhi stuck Mr. Cornara’s head on the metal fence around the factory, where Mr. Salhi occasionally made deliveries. He also put up two jihadist banners.

Mr. Salhi then drove the truck into a hangar on the site, where he tried to blow up the factory by ramming several cylinders containing nitrogen and other gases. Two people were injured in the explosion.

Video surveillance footage showed that Mr. Salhi had tried to open canisters containing flammable gases while shouting “Allahu akbar.” By that point, firefighters had arrived, and Mr. Salhi — who had sent two images of his boss’s head, posing with it in one of them, via a smartphone messaging program — was overpowered and arrested.

Mr. Salhi had links to Salafist extremist groups and had traveled to Syria in 2009, but he was not known to have connections with the Islamic State, the militant group behind the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris on Nov. 13.