France is to heighten security around synagogues in the country following the stabbing attack in Paris outside the former offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
“I have given instructions that all symbolic sites that have experienced attacks be protected,” French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.
“During this weekend and on Monday, a particularly important festival for our Jewish compatriots, I also asked for special protection of synagogues,’’ in a reference to Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonment which starts Sunday at sundown.
The magazine’s new address is kept secret.
The was “clearly an act of Islamist terrorism,” said the minister.
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.
According to Paris prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard, a 18-year-old man Ali.H,who came to France from Pakistan two years ago, has been arrested and admitted of being the perpetrator of the attack. Six other people are being held in connection with the attack.
French media established 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.