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The attacker is believed to have used a large butcher knife found near the scene.
French army soldiers rush to the scene after several people were injured near the former offices of the French satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ following an alleged attack by a man with a knife in the capital Paris on September 25, 2020. Image: AFP.
PARIS – A man armed with a butcher knife wounded two in Paris on Friday outside the former offices of the satirical weekly. Charlie hebdo before being arrested by the police, three weeks after the trial of the alleged accomplices in the 2015 massacre of newspaper staff.
France’s PNAT specialized antiterrorist prosecution office said it opened an investigation into charges of “attempted murder related to a terrorist company” as well as “conspiracy with terrorists.”
Charlie hebdo has angered many Muslims around the world by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad over the years, and in a defiant gesture reprinted some of the cartoons before the trial.
Twelve people, including some of France’s most famous cartoonists, were killed in the attack on _Charlie Hebdo _ by Islamist gunmen on January 7, 2015.
Paris police said two people were “seriously injured” in Friday’s attack near the newspaper’s former offices in the 11th arrondissement of the French capital. The new address of the magazine is kept secret.
The attacker is believed to have used a large butcher knife found near the scene.
Prime Minister Jean Castex, visiting the scene, said that the lives of the two victims “are not in danger, thank God.”
News production agency Premieres Lignes said the injured were its employees – a man and a woman taking a smoke break outside.
“They were both seriously injured,” Premieres Lignes founder and co-director Paul Moreira told AFP.
Another employee, who asked not to be identified, said he heard screams.
“I went to the window and saw a colleague, bloody, chased by a man with a machete.”
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‘HATE ATTACK’
Prosecutors in Paris said the “main perpetrator” was arrested not far from the crime scene.
According to the director of the PNAT, Jean-Francois Ricard, the suspect was an 18-year-old man. The first indications are that he was born in Pakistan.
A second person, 33, was later arrested and detained for questioning to determine possible links to the “main perpetrator,” Ricard said.
Five schools in the area were closed for several hours after the attack and half a dozen nearby metro stations were closed.
“Around noon we went to the restaurant for lunch. When we arrived, the manager started yelling ‘Come on, come on, there’s an attack …’ We ran to lock ourselves in our shop with four customers,” said Hassani Erwan, a 23-year-old barber he told AFP.
In a Twitter post, Charlie hebdo He expressed his support for “the people affected by this heinous attack.”
They were victims of “fanaticism” and “intolerance”, Charlie hebdo he said, calling the main suspect and his possible accomplice “terrorists.”
NEW THREATS
The stabbing occurred during the trial of 14 alleged accomplices of the Said brothers and Cherif Kouachi, the perpetrators of the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, which was claimed by an Al-Qaeda branch.
A female police officer died a day later, followed the day after by the murder of four men in a hostage-taking in a Jewish supermarket by the gunman Amedy Coulibaly.
The trial has reopened one of the most painful chapters in modern French history, with heartbreaking testimonies from survivors and relatives of the deceased.
The magazine received fresh threats from Al-Qaeda this month after it republished the controversial cartoons.
More than 100 French media outlets called on Wednesday for continued support for Charlie hebdo against what they described as the “enemies of freedom.”
Earlier this week, the police moved the newspaper’s head of human resources, Marika Bret, from her home after receiving death threats.
The trial, which began on September 2, was suspended Thursday after defendant Nezar Mickael Pastor Alwatik fell ill on the stand.
When it resumed on Friday, an intelligence officer told the court it was a “great regret” that his services had not been able to prevent the 2015 attacks.
“Every attack felt like a failure to all of us,” the officer said from behind an opaque screen set up to conceal his identity.
He acknowledged that the perpetrators had come to the attention of security forces years before the attacks, but that surveillance was abandoned in 2014 after “we detected no willingness on their part to act.
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