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Almost six years after the attack on “Charlie Hebdo”, a stabbing attack yesterday injured two people in Paris near the former building of the French satirical weekly, while two suspects were arrested.
The French Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into this attack, which rekindled fear in a neighborhood that witnessed the attack on the headquarters of “Charlie Hebdo” in January 2015.
The stabbing coincided with the trial sessions of the alleged accomplices of the perpetrators of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people died, at a time when the satirical newspaper was again the target of jihadist threats.
A preliminary police report indicated that four people were injured, two of them “in critical condition”, but later changed the result to only two injured.
“Two of my colleagues were smoking under the building on the street. I heard screams. I went to the window and saw one of them with blood on him being chased by a man carrying a machete,” said a witness who works for the agency “Promier Linnae”.
This news agency close to the daily “Charlie Hebdo” witnessed the attack, which was perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers in 2015 on the editorial board of the weekly, which has since moved to an unknown location.
According to police, a suspect was detained in Place de la Bastille near the scene of the attack, and another person was taken into custody pending investigation, according to a judicial source.
The French antiterrorist prosecutor said he had opened an investigation into “an assassination attempt linked to a terrorist act” and a “terrorist criminal association”.
Closed area
Police said anti-terrorist forces were dispatched to the scene and asked to “avoid going to the area.” A crisis cell was formed in the Ministry of the Interior when Interior Minister Gerald Darmanan and Prime Minister Jan Castex came to the scene of the attack.
The Paris Schools and Universities Administration said thousands of students in five schools around the area of the attack were still inside.
A journalist from the “French Press Agency” indicated that Nicolas Appér Street, where the satirical newspaper was based, was closed and dozens of armed police were immediately deployed there.
Hassani Arwan (23 years old), a hairdresser who works in a salon near the scene of the accident, said: “Around noon, we went to spend lunch in a restaurant. There were also four clients. “
“I was shocked by the bloody attack that took place near the former Charlie Hebdo building in the Paris region, which has already paid a heavy price for terrorist violence,” Paris region president Valerie Pecreis wrote on Twitter.
New threats
The attack came at a time when the editorial board of “Charlie Hebdo” was exposed to new threats since the reissue of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on September 2, coinciding with the start of the trial, which will continue until September 10. November, for the attacks of January 2015.
After a brief suspension of the trial, the session resumed without the Special Criminal Court of Paris mentioning this attack.
Earlier this week, Charlie Hebdo’s director of human resources, Marika Brett, was taken from her home with a police escort due to threats deemed serious.
Following these threats, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanan called for “a reevaluation of the threats against journalists and Charlie Hebdo collaborators.”
On Wednesday, 100 media outlets, including newspapers, magazines and television and radio channels, published an open letter calling on the French to mobilize for freedom of expression.
On January 7, 2015, brothers Sherif and Saeed Kouachi killed 11 people in an attack on the editorial board of the satirical weekly, before they fled and killed a policeman.
The next day, Amedi Coulibaly killed a policewoman in Montrouge, outside Paris, and on January 9, four people, all Jews, were killed when he took hostages at the Iber Cashier on the eastern outskirts of Paris.
The police killed Coulibaly after breaking into the store, and the Kouachi brothers were killed by special forces of the French police at a printing press where they had taken refuge in Damartan-en-Jules, northeast of Paris.
A series of attacks in France since January 2015 have killed 258 people. Five years later, the level of terrorist threat remains “very high”, according to the Interior Ministry.
