PARIS ATTACK UNDER INVESTIGATION.
PARIS • Investigators working to understand why a 20-year-old French citizen born in the Russian republic of Chechnya went on a stabbing rampage in central Paris detained the dead suspect’s parents and a friend Sunday, French officials said.
Counterterrorism investigators want to know if the assailant, identified by Chechnya’s leader as Khamzat Azimov, had help or co-conspirators. The attacker killed a 29-year-old man and wounded four other people with a knife before police fatally shot him Saturday night.
The suspect was on a police watchlist for radicalism, a judicial official not authorized to speak publicly about the case told The Associated Press. But he had a clean criminal record and did not know his victims, Interior Ministry spokesman Frederic de Lanouvelle said.
The parents were detained in Paris’ northern 18th district and the friend was detained in the eastern French city of Strasbourg on Sunday, the judicial official said.
French media reported Sunday that Azimov had lived in Strasbourg, which is 492 kilometres from Paris. It was unclear if he was residing with his parents in the French capital when he carried out the attack.
Witnesses reported hearing the man shouting “Allahu akbar,” the Arabic phrase for “God is great,” during the attack that happened at about 9 p.m. in a lively area near the Opera Garnier.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed the attacker was one of its “soldiers” three hours later, but provided no evidence to back the claim or details about his identity.
The assailant was listed in a nationwide database of thousands of people suspected of links to radicalism, according to the judicial official. Extremists behind multiple attacks in France in recent years have turned out to be on the watchlist.
The official said the suspect was born in November 1997 in the largely Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya, where extremism has long simmered.
Chechnya’s president insisted Sunday that France bears responsibility for the knifings, pointing out that Azimov only held a Russian passport until he was 14.
“I consider it necessary to state that all responsibility for the fact that Khamzat Azimov went on the road of crime lies completely with the authorities of France,” Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said.