The attack on the police headquarters in Paris was an offensive against the entity that sustains the establishment, as it does in the rest of the world. It sure was an extreme form of mental aberration. The assailant, named in the media as Mickaël H, 45, had held an administrative job in the IT department for more than 15 years. On Thursday afternoon, he killed three police officers and another member of the staff and injured two other officers before being shot dead. We do not know if there was a racist angle to the mayhem in France.

But there is an eerie similarity with the frequent killings of innocents in the United States of America, the trans-Atlantic thread being white dominance and the racist backlash. Questions remain over what might have led him to carry out the attack, which is being treated as potentially a personal issue. He first attacked three police officers who worked in the intelligence unit of police HQ. There were no witnesses present and all three officers died, so there were no details of what he might have said or any reasons given for the attack.

He then went out into a stairwell and attacked another staff member. The tragedy is being investigated by a regular Paris police unit and being treated as a murder and not a terrorist case. There is so far nothing to suggest that the case should be passed on to the anti-terrorist police. This would suggest that a possible terrorist angle has almost readily been ruled out. Le Monde reported that the assailant had converted to Islam 18 months ago, but initial searches at his home showed no signs of any radicalisation. He was not on any watchlist.

The attack happened a day after thousands of officers marched in Paris to protest against low wages, long hours and an increasing suicide rate in their ranks. Preliminary reports suggest that the incident was criminal in nature rather than an act of terror, indeed a moment of madness as the police have described it. A bonfire of sanity again? On closer reflection, it does fall into a pattern. It bears recall that coordinated bombings and shootings by Islamist militants in November 2015 at the Bataclan theatre and other locations around Paris killed 130 people in the deadliest attacks in France since the Second World War.

And in a three-day killing spree in January 2015, Islamist gunmen killed reporters and illustrators in the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, and shoppers at a Jewish supermarket. Thursday’s kitchen knife outrage in Paris shall remain a puzzle to be worked out for some time yet. But it is clear that the culture of violence finds many takers in this world of ours, even if the motives might sometimes vary.