Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron will regret his failure to crack down on Islamists

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. In recent months, his hardline Islamic beliefs were evident in how he dressed, what he ate and how he behaved towards his female colleagues. Yet still he was allowed to come to work each day.

This is a grave crisis for Emmanuel Macron. Prime minister Edouard Philippe expressed his confidence in the minister of the interior on Sunday but Castaner is fighting for his political life. As the centre-right Républicains MP Eric Ciotti put it, Castaner is “the Minister for Fake News”, who belongs to a government that at best is guilty of incompetence or at worst mendacity in its reaction to the attack.

There is a now a frantic internal investigation to discover if Harpon passed on sensitive information – such as the names and addresses of informers – to Islamic terrorists. The right-wing National Rassemblement have launched an online petition demanding the resignation of Castaner

There seem to be two sides to Castaner.

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