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French police have arrested a total of seven people after a butcher knife attack that left two injured outside the former offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, according to judicial sources.
The assault came three weeks after the trial of the alleged accomplices in the 2015 massacre of the newspaper’s staff.
Last night the French police released another man who was near the scene of the attack but who was confirmed to have witnessed “pursuing the attacker,” the judicial source said.
Those arrested include a former roommate of a man arrested in the incident.
France’s PNAT counterterrorism prosecution office said it had opened an investigation into charges of “attempted murder related to a terrorist company” against a man, as well as “conspiracy with terrorists.”
According to the director of the PNAT, Jean-Francois Ricard, the main suspect is an 18-year-old man. The first indications were that he was born in Pakistan.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the attack was “clearly an act of Islamist terrorism.”
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 yesterday’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.
The judicial source said today that a man was taken away for questioning who had been a roommate of the main suspect when he lived in social housing in the Val-d’Oise department north of Paris.
Five other people arrested in the Paris suburb of Pantin during a search of a property linked to the main suspect were also detained, a judicial source said last night.
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