Stabbing suspect wasn’t on police radar

Two wounded near site of Charlie Hebdo incident

Paris The main suspect in the double stabbing Friday outside the former Paris offices of a satirical newspaper where dozens were killed in 2015 was arrested a month ago for carrying a screwdriver but not on police radar for Islamic radicalization, France’s interior minister said.

Two suspects were arrested separately shortly after the stabbing in which two people were wounded, although the links between the two suspects weren’t immediately clear. The main suspect, the young man wearing orange g ym shoes, with a few speckles of blood on his forehead, was arrested on the steps of the Bastille Opera not far from the attack site, near the building where the weekly Charlie Hebdo was located before the 2015 attack.

The interior minister said the young man arrived in France three years ago as an unaccompanied minor, apparently from Pakistan, but his identity was still being verified.

“But manifestly it ’s an act of Islamist terrorism,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in an inter view with the France 2 television station.

“Obviously, there is little doubt. It ’s a new bloody attack against our countr y, against journalists, against this society.”

France’s counterterrorism prosecutor said earlier that 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-francois 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 stabbed, a woman and a man working at a documentary production company who had stepped outside for a smoke break.

An investigation was opened into “attempted murder in relation with a terrorist enterprise,” according to an official at the terrorism prosecutor ’s office.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex said the lives of the two wounded workers lives were not in danger.

The prime minister noted the “symbolic site” of the attack, “at the ver y moment where the trial into the atrocious acts against Charlie Hebdo is under way.”

He promised the government ’s “unfailing attachment to freedom of the press, and its determination to fight terrorism.”