2023-12-03 05:12:38
A German tourist died on Saturday evening in the west of Paris at the hands of an assailant armed with a knife and a hammer and known to French authorities as a radical Islamist with a psychological state described as unstable.
• Read also: “Help, help”: knife attack in Paris, a German killed and two people injured
Here is what we know about this attack perpetrated less than two months after the bloody attack in a high school in the north of France and following which the alert level was raised across the entire French territory.
The attack happened shortly after 9 p.m. a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower and other places that are particularly lively on weekends and popular with tourists.
The assailant attacked a couple of German tourists. “The husband died from stab wounds,” according to the account given by French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who visited the scene.
The wife’s life was saved “thanks to a taxi driver who seems to have intervened” and whose presence would have made the attacker flee to the other side of the Seine, a river which crosses the capital, added the minister.
Four police officers, quickly dispatched to the scene, pursued him on foot. They attempt a first arrest. But the assailant, “with his hands in his overcoat,” threatened them with carrying explosives, according to Mr. Darmanin.
He continued his escape, then attacked two other people, according to the minister, before being arrested near a square after two taser shots.
The attacker “does not have his life in danger and will therefore be able to answer for his actions before the courts”, underlined Gérald Darmanin.
A couple of German tourists were hit: the man, born in 1999, died from stab wounds. The woman “was not physically attacked”, but is “extremely shocked”, according to Mr. Darmanin.
Two other people were attacked: “one person would be injured by a hammer blow to the eye and another would be particularly shocked,” says Gérald Darmanin.
The two injured are a Frenchman, aged around sixty, and a foreign tourist, he said.
According to a police source, he is Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a Frenchman born in 1997 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine, department west of Paris).
His parents are of Iranian nationality, a security source told AFP.
Sentenced for another attack
This man with a “very unstable profile, very easily influenced”, according to a security source, had already been arrested in 2016 by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) for a planned violent action in La Défense. He was sentenced to five years of imprisonment and was released after four years of detention, according to this source.
Released from prison in 2020, he lived with his parents in Essonne (south of Paris) and would be followed for significant psychiatric disorders, “even neurological disorders”, detailed Mr. Darmanin. He had stopped taking his treatment, a security source told AFP.
On Saturday, a protest video was posted on social networks alongside his action. It talks about current events, the government and the murder of innocent Muslims.
According to Mr. Darmanin’s account, the attacker was “obviously ready to kill other people” on Saturday evening. He reportedly uttered “Allah Akbar” several times and told the police a few moments after his arrest that he “could no longer bear to see Muslims die, both in Afghanistan and in Palestine, that’s what he said.” to the police a few moments after his arrest.”
He also reportedly said that he “resented what was happening in Gaza and that France would be complicit in what Israel was doing.”
The attacker was arrested and then placed in police custody as part of an investigation initially entrusted to the Paris criminal brigade, under the direction of the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Then the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office told AFP to take action, opening an investigation for assassination and attempted assassination in relation to a terrorist enterprise and for criminal terrorist association. The assailant’s custody will therefore continue in this context.
Investigators should be able to rely on “the police pedestrian cameras which have been activated”, according to Gérald Darmanin.
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