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AFP
This capture taken from video obtained by AFP shows French police detaining a suspected suspect after several people were injured near the former offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo following an attack by a man with a knife in Paris. on September 25, 2020.
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 police, three weeks after the trial of suspected accomplices in the 2015 massacre of staff at the Newspaper.
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.”
Seven people, including the main suspect, were being held for questioning in connection with the attack.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the attack was “clearly an act of Islamist terrorism.”
“This is a new bloody attack on our country,” Darmanin told France 2 broadcaster.
Charlie Hebdo has angered many Muslims around the world by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad over the years and defiantly 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.
A source close to the investigation confirmed to AFP that the attacker 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.
The company specializes in investigative reports and produces the award-winning Cash Investigation program.
‘Hateful 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.
Child welfare authorities said the suspect had not shown “any sign of radicalization” while in their care after arriving in France in August 2018 and claiming to be a minor.
The suspect was arrested in June for possession of a sharp weapon, a source close to the case said.
A second person, a 33-year-old Algerian, was later arrested for questioning to determine possible links to the “main perpetrator,” Ricard said.
Five more people, all men born between 1983 and 1996 who were arrested in the Paris suburb of Pantin during a search of a property linked to the main suspect, were also being held for questioning, a judicial source said Friday night.
Five schools in the area were closed for several hours after the attack and half a dozen nearby metro stations were closed.
In a Twitter post, Charlie Hebdo expressed his support for “those affected by this heinous attack.”
They were victims of “bigotry” and “intolerance,” Charlie Hebdo said, calling the main suspect and his possible accomplice “terrorists.”
‘He underestimated the threat’
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 that was claimed by a branch of Al-Qaeda.
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.
