Paris killer’s background investigated

INVESTIGATORS yesterday were probing the background of a 20-year-old Frenchman born in Chechnya who killed one man and wounded four others, including a Chinese national, during a stabbing spree in central Paris.

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility.

The Saturday night attack in a lively area of theaters and restaurants near the city’s historic opera house was the latest in a series of apparent Islamist strikes in France that have killed 245 people in the past three years.

Panic broke out on the busy Rue Monsigny with people fleeing into bars and restaurants as the man walked along stabbing people, yelling “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”) before police shot him dead.

Police identified the assailant as “Khamzat A,” who grew up with his family in Strasbourg, east France, said a source close to the inquiry. The city is home to a large community of refugees from the Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya.

He became a French citizen in 2010 after his mother was naturalized, government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux told French television.

A friend of the attacker is believed to have been arrested in Strasbourg.

Russian news reports said the Russian embassy in Paris was pressing French officials for more information on the knifeman, whose parents have been taken into custody for questioning in Paris.

Although Khamzat had no criminal record, he had been on both of France’s main watch lists for suspected radicals — the so-called “S file” as well as a more targeted File for the Prevention of Terrorist Radicalization, which focuses on people judged to be terror threats — since 2016.

One source said Khamzat had been questioned by antiterror investigators last year “because he knew a man who was in contact with a person who had gone to Syria.”

Hundreds of Chechens have joined Islamic militant groups in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere in recent years.

The Islamic State group said one of its “soldiers” had carried out the Paris attack, but provided no evidence to back the claim.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “France has once again paid the price in blood but will not give an inch to the enemies of freedom.” Thousands of French troops remain on the streets.

The Chinese Embassy in France said yesterday that the life of the Chinese national who was among the injured is not at risk.