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Suspect arrested after knife attack outside Charlie Hebdo's former office in Paris
[France24] French prosecutors have opened a terrorism investigation after two people were wounded in a knife attack in Paris on Friday near the former offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The suspected perpetrator, as well as six other men, have been taken into custody.Two victims were seriously injured, the Paris police department said. The main suspect was caught and taken into custody almost immediately after the attack, along with another man whose links to the suspected perpetrator is currently being investigated. Later Friday, police also detained five other men who were apprehended as officers searched a home in the Paris suburbs believed to belong to the main suspect. France’s counterterrorism prosecutor said authorities suspect a terrorist motive because of the place and timing of the stabbings: in front of the building where Charlie Hebdo was based until the Islamic extremist attack on its cartoonists and at a time when suspects in the 2015 attack are on trial across town. Prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said that the chief suspect in Friday’s stabbings was arrested, along with another person. Ricard said the assailant did not know the people who were stabbed, two workers in a documentary production company who had stepped outside for a cigarette break. The suspects’ identities have not been released, and it is unclear exactly what prompted the attack. An investigation was opened into “attempted murder in relation with a terrorist enterprise”, according to an official at the terrorism prosecutor’s office. ‘LOOKS IMPROVISED’ Citing corroborative sources close to the investigation, FRANCE 24’s terror expert Wassim Nasr said that the main suspect has confessed to the attack and is an 18-year-old man of Pakistani origin. He is not believed to have been known to police previously. “We don’t know much about him because up to this point, no [terror] organisation has claimed the attack,” said Nasr. Nasr said the second suspect, who is being probed for his links to the Pakistani man and who several news outlets have identified as an Algerian national, is expected to be released shortly. Another five men, born between 1983 and 1996, were seized in the Paris suburb of Pantin on Friday evening as police searched what they believe is the main suspect’s home. Nasr said the attack indeed seemed symbolic and that it may have been triggered by Charlie Hebdo’s decision in September to republish the controversial cartoons, including of Prophet Mohammed, that led to the deadly attack at the weekly´s offices in 2015. Many Muslims consider is blasphemous to depict the prophet. “Not only did al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issue statements calling for [new] attacks (…) but many voices in the Muslim world spoke out against the republication of those cartoons,” he said. No terror organisation has yet claimed the attack, and according to Nasr, several details point to it being improvised and having been organised only by the main suspect. “Look at the details of this attack: it was carried out with a butcher´s knife, it doesn’t look like the attacks that were prepared by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and perpetrated by the Karachi brothers back in 2015.” Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2020-09-25 |
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