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PARIS: French investigators were on Sunday (September 27) studying a video claiming responsibility for the butcher knife attack in Paris targeting the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo as the government condemned an act of “Islamist terrorism” .
Six people were still in custody, including the alleged perpetrator of Friday’s attack that left two seriously injured in front of the former Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.
The man is a Pakistani-born 18-year-old named Hassan A, according to a source close to the investigation.
Carried out since Friday, he told investigators that he had carried out the attack to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s reissue of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, which was the target of a January 2015 massacre by Islamist gunmen.
Investigators were now seeking to authenticate a video that they believe could show Hassan A. announcing that he was about to carry out the attack.
“We see him crying, chanting. He claims beforehand his act by evoking the reissue of the cartoons,” said the source, who asked not to be identified.
“It is a kind of manifesto, he announces that he is going to act,” said the source, adding: “It is not a claim of loyalty to an organization.”
The suspect was born in the Pakistani city of Mandi Bahauddin and, although he speaks a little French, he has needed a translator during questioning, a source close to the investigation said.
He is believed to have entered France three years ago when he was still a minor and had not shown any risk of radicalization despite having been arrested once for carrying a weapon.
‘AT WAR WITH ISLAMIC TERRORISM’
The two injured were employees of the award-winning television production company Premieres Lignes, whose offices are on the same block that used to house Charlie Hebdo in the center of the capital.
However, the two, whose lives are not in danger, are not believed to be a specific target.
The man mistakenly believed that Charlie Hebdo’s offices were still in that building and wanted to attack journalists from the magazine, according to his statement to investigators.
One detained person was released overnight. But in addition to the main suspect, eight others were still in custody.
Among them are his younger brother and the people who lived with him in his last place of residence in the north of Paris.
Police also detained a woman on Sunday who had been living in the same residence, a judicial source said, without giving further details.
The arrests were aimed at understanding the “environment” of the main suspect, said a source close to the case, adding: “Everything leads us to think that he acted alone.”
An Algerian, detained near the scene of the attack, was also released. His attorney said his client had been “heroically” pursuing the attacker.
The attack came three weeks after a trial in Paris of suspected accomplices in the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, a policewoman and a Jewish supermarket that left 17 people dead.
The bloodshed heralded a wave of Islamist violence in France that has so far left 258 dead.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin acknowledged that the authorities may have become complacent about the terrorist risk after a relative lull in high-profile attacks in recent years.
“We are in an extremely critical situation, we are at war with Islamist terrorism. Perhaps collectively we will put this behind us,” he said.
Darmanin said the threat remains real, noting that 32 attacks have been thwarted in the past three years. “It’s about once a month,” he said.
In recent weeks, the centrist government of President Emmanuel Macron has begun to use increasingly harsh rhetoric on national security issues in what analysts see as a shift to the right.
Macron’s counterterrorism adviser, Laurent Núñez, told AFP that France had “improved in the detection” of extremists, but “still had to tighten the network.
