A French jihadi who stabbed two police workers to death and took their 3-year-old son hostage for hours on Monday broadcast part of his deadly attack on Facebook Live, a new video-streaming feature that Facebook released in April.
A French citizen named by sources as Larossi Abballa, 25, reportedly ambushed Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, a police official in the Paris suburb of Les Mureaux, as Salvaing was coming home from work Monday evening in the Paris suburb of Magnanville.
Abballa murdered Salvaing using a knife, and then entered the home, where he fatally stabbed Salvaing’s partner, Jessica Schneider, 36, and took the couple’s 3-year-old son hostage.
The BBC reported that after the double-slaying, Abballa used Facebook Live to pledge allegiance to Daesh, also known as Islamic State. In a 13-minute livestream on the new platform, Abballa said he was contemplating “what to do” with his 3-year-old hostage, and also threatened fans of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, saying, “The Euros will be a graveyard,” Reuters reported.
Facebook Live was launched in April as a way to increase video use among the tech giant’s 1.5 billion global users. “It’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time.
Facebook didn’t remove the video until the next day, Reuters said. The social network also appears to have removed Abballa’s profile, where Abballa reportedly uploaded photos of his victims before he was slain by French special forces.
The 3-year-old child survived the attack.
Facebook spokesperson Michelle Gilbert told Reuters that the company's guidelines forbade hate messages and aimed to remove such content quickly once alerted.
-HS
