Man stabs 2 in Paris outside satirical newspaper’s former office
PARIS — A young man stabbed two people Friday outside the former Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were killed in 2015, and a terrorism investigation has been opened into the new attack, authorities said.
The suspect had been arrested a month ago for carrying a screwdriver but was not on police radar for Islamic radicalization, France’s interior minister said. He said the screwdriver was considered a weapon but did not explain why.
Two people were wounded in Friday’s attack, and two suspects were arrested, although the links between the two suspects weren’t immediately clear.
The main suspect, a young man with speckles of blood on his head, was arrested on the steps of the Bastille Opera in eastern Paris, authorities said.
The interior minister said the assailant arrived in France three years ago as an unaccompanied minor, apparently from Pakistan, but his identity was still being verified.
“Manifestly, it’s an act of Islamist terrorism,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in an interview with public broadcaster France- 2. “Obviously, there is little doubt. It’s a new bloody attack against our country, 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 the chief suspect in Friday’s stabbings was arrested, along with another person. Mr. Ricard said the assailant did not know the victims, 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 the terrorism prosecutor’s office.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex said the victims are expected to survive and offered the government’s solidarity with their families and colleagues.
The prime minister noted the “symbolic site” of the attack, “at the very moment where the trial into the atrocious acts against Charlie Hebdo is under way.”