A 23-year-old German-Filipino tourist died on Saturday evening at the hands of a French attacker, a radical Islamist with psychiatric disorders, armed with a knife and a hammer, who sowed fear near the Eiffel Tower in western Paris.
• Also read: “Help, help”: knife attack in Paris, a German killed and two people injured
Here’s what we know about this attack, which came less than two months after the bloody attack on a high school in northern France and after which the alert level was raised across French territory.
The attack happened around 9 p.m., a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower and other places that are particularly busy and popular with tourists on weekends.
The attacker attacked a couple of German tourists, both nurses, the emergency doctor who treated them told AFP.
“The husband died of stab wounds,” said the report by French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who visited the crime scene on Saturday.
His severely shocked companion, who, according to the emergency doctor, suffered no physical injuries, was saved “thanks to a taxi driver who apparently intervened” and whose presence would have caused the attacker to flee to the other side of the Seine, the river that crosses the capital , added the minister.
He then attacked two men with a hammer, a 60-year-old Frenchman and a 66-year-old British man, who were injured in the eye, before being arrested near a square after two Tasers, according to the Anti-Terror Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat). was shots.
A few German tourists were hit: the 23-year-old German-Filipino man died from stab wounds. The woman “was not physically attacked” but was “extremely shocked,” Mr. Darmanin said.
For their part, the two men attacked with a hammer are “in good health today,” said Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau on France 3 on Sunday, pointing out that both had “superficial trauma,” although their “psychological trauma” would be immense “.
According to a police source, it is Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a 26-year-old Frenchman who was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine, department west of Paris) and whose parents are Iranian. said a security source.
According to a police source, he is known to the judicial authorities for radical Islamism and psychiatric disorders and was shouting “Allah akbar” at the time of the incidents.
He reportedly told police officers who arrested him that he “could no longer bear the deaths of Muslims in both Afghanistan and Palestine.” He would also have stated that he was “upset by it,” without naming who, “what happened in Gaza” and that France would be “complicit in what Israel did there,” Mr. Darmanin said.
Convicted of another attack
He was arrested by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) in 2016 for a planned violent operation in La Défense, west of Paris, sentenced to five years in prison and served four years in pre-trial detention.
After his release from prison in 2020, he was placed under judicial supervision and Micas, an administrative system accompanied by measures comparable to judicial supervision and aimed at preventing terrorist acts.
According to Gérald Darmanin, he lived with his parents in Essonne and posted a video on social networks in which he claimed responsibility for his attack, police and security sources confirmed to AFP.
In the video, the attacker mentions “the news, the government, the murder of innocent Muslims,” the security source explained.
The attacker was arrested and then taken into police custody as part of an investigation initially entrusted to the Paris Criminal Brigade, led by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The Anti-Terror Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) has opened an investigation. According to a security source interviewed by AFP, investigators will now examine the medical follow-up of the author, a man with a “very unstable profile who is very easily influenced.”
“Whether he was medically monitored, as he should have been and as he was for a while, that is a question that will arise,” a police source told AFP.
According to a source close to the intelligence service, 20% of the approximately 5,000 people monitored for radicalization in France suffer from psychiatric disorders.