A police officer gunned down in a suspected terror attack in Paris this week was deployed to the Bataclan Theater the night it was attacked by Islamist extremists in November 2015.
Xavier Jugele, 37, was killed while on duty on the Champs Elysees on Thursday, a spokesperson for France’s UNSA police union told NBC News.
Jugele was also one of the officers invited to attend the Sting concert that marked the reopening of the Bataclan late last year.
Eighty-nine people were killed when the music venue was attacked in November 2015. Scores of others were killed as ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers struck in a coordinated attack across the city on the same night.
The gunman responsible for Thursday’s shooting was named as named by French officials as 39-year-old Karim Cheurfi Friday.
Cheurfi was shot dead in the attack that injured two other police officers.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters Friday that Cheurfi had a history of attacking police officers and had already served 11-years in prison for trying to kill another police officer in 2005.
Molins also revealed that Cheurfi had been arrested in January after police received a tip off that he was amassing an arsenal of weapons and had made threats against officers. However, he was released because of a lack of evidence.
After Cheurfi was shot dead on Thursday, police found a piece of paper bearing pro-Isis propaganda beside his body and a Quran in the trunk of the Audi he had been driving.
Although he was well known to police, he was not on a watch list of Islamic extremists and was not considered a security risk.
