There will be much more to come on the religious and political affiliations of French jihadist Larossi Abballa, killed by the French police in Magnanville on Monday. Abballa had seemingly murdered two French police officers and held their three year old child hostage.
The use of live social media during terrorist attacks is an emerging phenomenon - during the December 2014 Sydney coffee shop siege, Islamic State supporter Man Haron Monis uploaded onto You Tube videos of his hostages, and also allowed those held in the store to update their Facebook accounts. The videos were quickly taken down by You Tube, although I have one screenshot
Download Joel Herat - YouTube at 1220 uk time 15 12 2014(pdf).
In Toulouse in 2012, Islamist gunman Mohammed Merah filmed his own attacks, sending a memory stick to Al-Jazeera shortly before he was killed.
Abballa appears to have built on this trend, live streaming a statement from the murder scene on Facebook. This was then turned into a slightly shorter video by Islamic State's media department. Also in his Facebook update was the very odd image below, where he appears to be expressing concern about Freemasons, and occult imagery being used to promote the European Football championships.
Such concerns represent an interesting area where Islamist, jihadist and western conspiracist beliefs appear to overlap. Earlier this year in the US we saw a police investigation into an alleged jihadist plot to carry out a terrorist attack on a Masonic hall in Milwaukee. Sadly masons now need to be added to the long list of potential victims of jihadist actors in the west.