On 20 December 2014, a man in Joué-lès-Tours near the city of Tours in central France entered a police station and attacked officers with a knife, shouting "Allahu Akbar" and injuring three before he was shot and killed.

[1][3][4] The attacker was identified as Bertrand Nzohabonayo, age 20, a French citizen and former rap musician born in Burundi in 1994, he was known to the police for minor crimes but was not on any watchlist.

[13] According to David C. Rapoport of the University of California, Los Angeles, these three attacks can be understood in the context of the rise of the Islamic State in Syria.

"In September 2014, after the U.S. organized its airstrikes, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman called on Muslims in Western countries to find an infidel and ‘smash his head with a rock’, poison him, run him over with a car or ‘destroy his crops’.

Two months later a video released in French contained virtually the same message and a series of strange 'lone wolf' attacks followed on three consecutive days, the perpetrators declaring “'God is Great' in Arabic.