Young man stabs two people in front of Charlie Hebdo offices, terrorism investigation opens

A young man stabbed two people on Friday outside the former Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were killed in 2015, and a terrorism investigation into the new attack was opened, authorities said.

The alleged assailant had been arrested a month ago for carrying a screwdriver, but was not on the police radar for Islamic radicalization, the French interior minister said. He said the screwdriver was considered a weapon, but did not explain why.

Two people were injured in Friday’s attack and two suspects were arrested, although the links between the two suspects were not immediately clear.

The main suspect, a young man with bloodstains on his forehead and wearing orange gym shoes, was arrested on the steps of the Opera Bastille in eastern Paris, authorities said.

The site is not far from where Friday’s attack took place, outside the building where the weekly Charlie Hebdo was located prior to the 2015 attack.

The interior minister said the assailant arrived in France three years ago as an unaccompanied minor, apparently from Pakistan, but his identity is still being verified.

“It is clearly an act of Islamist terrorism,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in an interview with the public broadcaster France-2.

“Obviously, there is little doubt. It is a new bloody attack against our country, against journalists, against this society.”

France’s counterterrorism prosecutor said previous authorities suspected a terrorist motive because of the place and time of the stabbings: in front of the building where Charlie Hebdo was located until the Islamic extremist attack on his cartoonists, and at a time when they are the suspects of the 2015 attack on trial in the city.

Prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said the main suspect in Friday’s stabbings was arrested along with another person. Ricard said the assailant did not know the people stabbed, a woman and a man who worked in a documentary production company and who had gone out to smoke.

An investigation was opened for “attempted murder in connection with a terrorist company,” according to the Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex said the lives of the two injured workers were not in danger. He offered the government’s solidarity with his families and colleagues.

The prime minister pointed to the “symbolic site” of the attack, “at the same time that the trial for the heinous acts against Charlie Hebdo is taking place.” He promised the government’s “unerring adherence to press freedom and its determination to fight terrorism.”

People in the neighborhood were stunned and said on French television that they were reliving the nightmare of the newsroom massacre.

In a tweet, Charlie Hebdo strongly condemned the stabbings.

“This tragic episode shows us once again that fanaticism, intolerance, whose origins will be revealed by the investigation, are still present in French society … It is not about giving up anything,” said the newspaper.

The two confirmed injuries were working for the documentary company Premieres Lignes, according to founder Paul Moreira. He told French television BFM that the attacker fled to the subway and that the company’s staff members were evacuated.

Moreira said that a man on the street “attacked two people who were in front of the building, they did not enter the building … he attacked them with an ax and left.” He said the company had not received threats.

His colleague, Luc Hermann, describing the witness version of the attack, said that the assailant first hit the woman in the face, then the man, before returning to attack the woman again.

“The whole team … took refuge on the roof of the building like our team did five years ago during the Charlie Hebdo attack,” he said on France-2.

He said it was “incomprehensible” that the authorities had not taken special security precautions, particularly at this time.

A heartbreaking two-month trial for the Charlie Hebdo attacks is currently underway in the main courthouse in Paris. Whispers were heard in the terrorism trial of 14 people, including three fugitives, accused of aiding the attackers in the January 2015 killings, news leaked.

The widows of the two brothers who broke into the newspaper’s offices and opened fire at a morning editorial meeting testified Friday.

Caty Richard, an attorney for the Charlie Hebdo journalists, learned of the knife attack midway through the trial.

“My first thought was that this will never end,” he said. “I am devastated, angry.”

The interior minister admitted that security was lacking on the street where Charlie Hebdo once had his headquarters. He said 775 police officers protect his new location.

But “there was an attack, so we could have done better,” he said. The minister said that he ordered special protection for all “symbolic sites”, noting in particular Jewish sites ahead of the Yom Kippur holiday this weekend. A Jewish grocery store was attacked days after the Charlie Hebdo newsroom massacre in what authorities say were coordinated attacks.

Charlie Hebdo recently reproduced cartoons of the Muslim prophet that stirred the ire of some Muslims when they were first produced.

Associated Press reporters at the scene saw police flood the neighborhood in eastern Paris near the Richard Lenoir metro station, which remained cordoned off for hours. The children were kidnapped from nine schools while police searched the area, but were later released, according to the Paris school district.

Witness Kader Alfa told the AP at the scene: “I saw a guy who was between 30 and 40 years old with an ax in his hand and who was walking behind a victim covered in blood.”

Police initially announced that four people were injured in the attack, but a police officer told the AP that there were in fact only two confirmed injuries. Police could not explain the discrepancy.

– AP