A suspected accomplice of a man believed to have attacked and wounded two people with a meat cleaver on Friday in front of a Paris office building has been released, a judicial source told reporters.
Another person close to the suspected attacker and believed to have been a former roommate in a hotel north of Paris had been arrested, following a series of other arrests on Friday evening, the source said.
Yesterday morning, seven people remained in custody including the suspected attacker.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The suspected attacker was cooperating with the police, a police source said.
The attack took place in front of a building where Muslim militants gunned down employees of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015.
It coincided with the start this month of the trial of 14 alleged accomplices in the 2015 attack. The gunmen behind that attack killed 12 people.
Police on Friday quickly detained the man suspected of carrying out the cleaver attack next to the steps of an opera house about 500m away.
The suspected attacker was from Pakistan and arrived in France three years ago as an unaccompanied minor, French Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin said.
A second suspect was detained moments after the attack and prosecutors were trying to establish his relationship to the attacker.
He was released free of charge, the source said.
Charlie Hebdo vacated its offices after the 2015 attack and is now in a secret location. The building is now used by a television production company.
Two of the production company’s staff, a man and a woman, were in the street having a cigarette break when they were attacked, according to prosecutors and a colleague of the victims.
After the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, investigators said the militants had wanted to avenge the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in the magazine. Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons on the eve of the trial.
Al-Qaeda, the militant extremist group that claimed responsibility for the 2015 attack, threatened to attack Charlie Hebdo again after it republished the cartoons.
France has experienced a wave of attacks by Muslim militants in the past few years.
Bombings and shootings in November 2015 at the Bataclan theater and sites across Paris killed 130 people, and in July 2016 a Muslim militant drove a truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 people.
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