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France has opened a counter-terrorism investigation after two journalists were stabbed today in Paris near the former offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that was attacked by Islamist militants in 2015.
Prime Minister Jean Castex, who rushed to the scene, said the main attacker had been arrested and that the lives of none of the injured were in danger.
A second person was also in custody after the attack, in which witnesses said that a butcher knife or butcher knife had been used as a weapon.
A local resident, who heard the attack, said there was a long, deadly scream from “a person who was yelling and screaming.”
A neighbor said she saw blood on the ground and people carrying an injured woman to a building that housed a news agency.
A police source said that the main suspect was 18 years old, known to the security services, was born in Pakistan and had been arrested with blood on him.
A second source said a butcher knife had been found on the floor near a subway station.
The attack took place in what Castex said was a “symbolic location” and coincided with the start this month of the trial of 14 suspected accomplices in the 2015 attack.
The court heard that the 14 had tried to avenge the Prophet Muhammad, nearly a decade after cartoons were published in the weekly newspaper mocking him.
In 2015, gunmen killed 17 people in three days of violence that began when they opened fire at Charlie Hebdo’s offices.
Al-Qaeda, the militant Islamist group that claimed responsibility for the 2015 attack, threatened to attack Charlie Hebdo again after it republished the cartoons this month.
The National Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office said it was investigating the case.
“The government is … determined by all means to fight terrorism,” Castex said, adding that the two victims of today’s attack had been having a cigarette.
Read more:
Charlie Hebdo republishes Muhammad cartoons for trial start
Police moved Charlie Hebdo’s head of human resources from her home this week after receiving threats against her life.
Today, television footage showed ambulances, fire trucks and police cordoning off the area around the former Charlie Hebdo offices.
Paul Moreira, a journalist for the Premieres Lignes media production company, told BFM TV that two of his colleagues had been injured.
“It’s someone who was on the road with a butcher knife attacking them outside our offices. It was chilling,” he said.
France has experienced a wave of attacks by Islamist militants in recent years.
The bombings and shootings in November 2015 at the Bataclan theater and other locations around Paris killed 130 people, and in July 2016 an Islamist militant drove a truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing to 86.
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