A Paris prosecutor has opened a terrorism investigation after two people were seriously injured in a knife attack in central Paris on Friday near the former offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo where.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin spoke of an Islamist terror attack.
The stabbing came as a trial was underway in the capital for alleged accomplices of the instigators of the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people, including some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists, were killed in the attack by terrorists Said and Chérif Kouachi, who claimed to be part of a branch of al Qaeda.
Prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said that the chief suspect in Friday’s stabbings was arrested, along with another person. He said the assailant – a 18-year-old Pakistani- did not know the people who were stabbed, two workers in a documentary production company who had stepped outside for a cigarette break. Several other people were later arrested in Pantin, a Paris suburb.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex underscored the “symbolic site” of the attack, “at the very 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”.
An investigation was opened into “attempted murder in relation with a terrorist enterprise”, according to an official at the terrorism prosecutor’s office.
French Journalists made a link between Friday’s attack and Pakistani Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s statements earlier this month strongly condemning Charlie Hebdo’s action to reprint the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
Morover anti-France rallied took place in the country.