The judges who tried Larossi Abballa in September 2013 warned that “violent actions on national territory [could] not be excluded.” But Abballa had served 2½ years in prison and was freed at the end of his trial for participating in a jihadist network.
On Monday night, the Frenchman (25) stabbed a police officer to death, then slashed the throat of his partner in front of their small son. The fact that killer and victims were from the same area and may have known each other, that Abballa went to their home, created an unsettling intimation of something resembling civil war.
Abballa foretold his act in a February 2011 email that was intercepted by French intelligence and quoted by Le Monde: "Frankly, do you think we need to go over there? Allah, through his will, will give us the means to raise the flag here. We have to start cleansing the KUFFAR [infidels]."
A majority of French people want the government to put men like Abballa in prison and throw away the key.
Abballa and the seven young men who stood trial with him exchanged jihadist books and explosives manuals. They practised slashing the throats of rabbits. He was moved four times while in prison, because he was found to be radicalising other prisoners. All this was known.
Two of the three men arrested on Tuesday were Abballa’s co-defendants in 2013.
"He told me his phones were tapped because of his former conviction, and that he was on the 'S' list [of more than 10,000 radical Islamists]," the former girlfriend of the Islamic State killer told France Info radio. "It made him laugh."
"I will not let it be said there was the slightest negligence or lack of judgment," prime minister Manuel Valls told France Inter radio.
Jérôme Fourquet of the polling company Ifop, says the French no longer distinguish between internal and external threats, see the large Muslim minority as a sort of “fifth column”, and are resigned to the possibility of further attacks.
"Liberal democracy is beginning to be questioned," Fourquet told Libération. "Overall, there's a demand for authority and repression."
Right-wing presidential candidates have reiterated calls for preventive detention or electronic bracelets for suspected Islamists, longer prison sentences, shutting down mosques and deporting radical imams, and criminalising the consultation of jihadist websites.
Justice minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas on Wednesday rejected the idea of preventive detention for those on the “S” list: “In France, we don’t judge intentions; we judge acts,” he said.
There may be a correlation between territorial losses by Islamic State, also known as Isis, and attacks in Europe and the US. "We will see more attacks because we are facing a terrorist organisation that is losing ground in Syria and Iraq, " Mr Valls said.
A security source quoted by Reuters confirmed a report in the Belgian newspaper DH that a group of Islamic State fighters left Syria some 10 days ago with the intention of staging attacks in Belgium and France.
Islamic State has lost between 30 and 50 per cent of its territory since 2014. Falluja, in Iraq's Sunni heartland, is under siege by government forces and the US-led coalition. The Kurdish Peshmerga are advancing towards Mosul. In Syria, the Kurdish YPG endangers the "capital" Raqqa, while Bashar al-Assad's army is gaining in the south. Islamic State's stronghold in Syrte, Libya, is also threatened.
Attacks like those in Orlando and Magnanville will not end, experts say. "Even if Islamic State loses its towns in Iraq and Syria one by one, this form of radicalisation will continue," says Farhad Khosrokhavar, a specialist on radical Islam. "Other innocent citizens risk losing their lives. It will take 10 to 20 years to eradicate the threat."
