French investigators were yesterday probing the background of a 20-year-old Frenchman born in Russia who killed one man and wounded four people during a stabbing spree, with sources close to the case saying he had been on a watch list of suspected extremists.
The Saturday night attack in a lively area of theaters and restaurants near the main opera house was the latest in a series of suspected extremist attacks in France that have killed about 245 people since 2015.
The attacker was shot and killed by police after an officer unsuccessfully tried to stop him with a Taser.
Judicial sources said the man was born in Chechnya, a Muslim-majority Russian republic which has been the scene of two bloody separatist wars since the 1990s.
Hundreds of Muslim militants from Chechnya have left to join armed groups in the Middle East, North Africa and other regions in the past few years.
The Russian embassy in Paris was pressing French officials for more information on the assailant, whose parents have been taken into custody for questioning, Russian news reports said.
Investigators have not yet said when the man arrived in France.
The man, born in November 1997, was on France’s so-called “S file” of people suspected of radicalized views who could pose security risks, the sources said, though he did not have a criminal record.
The Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility, saying one of its “soldiers” had carried out the attack, according to the SITE monitoring group, but provided no corroborating proof to back its assertion.
The attack was condemned by Hassen Chalghoumi, head of the Conference of French Imams.
“Last night’s attack reminds us how much our security, freedom and democracy have become targets for these people,” he said in a statement.
Witnesses described a wave of panic on rue Monsigny as people fled into bars and restaurants seeking cover as the man struck apparently at random, yelling “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great).
“I was taking orders and I saw a young woman trying to get into the restaurant in panic,” Jonathan, a waiter at a Korean restaurant, told repoters.
The woman was bleeding and a young man fended off the assailant who then ran away, he said.
“The attacker entered a shopping street, I saw him with a knife in his hand,” he said. “He looked crazy.”
Milan, 19, said he saw “several people in distress” including a woman with wounds to her neck and leg. “Firemen were giving her first aid. I heard two, three shots and a policeman told me that the man had been overpowered.”
A 29-year-old man was killed in the attack, while a 34-year-old Luxembourg man and a 54-year-old woman were seriously wounded and rushed to hospital.
A 26-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man were slightly wounded, but French Minister of the Interior Gerard Collomb later told reporters that all four were out of danger.
“I was on the cafe terrace, I heard three, four shots, it happened very fast,” 47-year-old Gloria said.
“The bartenders told us to come inside very quickly. Then I went out to see what was going on, and then I saw a man on the ground,” she added.
“France has once again paid the price in blood, but will not give an inch to the enemies of freedom,” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted.
The attack again underscored the difficulty in keeping track of suspected radicals by police facing thousands of potential risks, either homegrown or who have immigrated to the country.
Besides the S file, France maintains a File for the Prevention of Terrorist Radicalisation, which focuses on people judged to be terror threats.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to