Paris – The Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the murder in Paris of a tourist of German and Filipino nationality, perpetrated on Saturday by a French man booked for Islamism and with psychiatric problems, who also injured two other people.
The attacker, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a 26-year-old Frenchman, was arrested after the incident.
The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) opened an investigation for murder and attempted murder in relation to a terrorist activity and for illicit criminal terrorist association.
Three other people close to him were also detained, indicated the Pnat.
The events took place on Saturday around 9:00 p.m. (22:00 GMT) near the Bir Hakeim bridge, a place highly frequented by tourists due to its proximity to the Eiffel Tower.
The attacker first stabbed a 23-year-old tourist with dual German and Filipino nationality.
After the man died, the young man “attacked the wife of this German tourist,” but a “taxi driver who saw the scene” allowed him to be saved, said French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
Shortly afterwards he attacked two other people with a hammer, one of 66 years of British nationality and another of France, aged 60, whose lives are not in danger, according to the Pnat.
The murder triggered a wave of reactions. The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, declared himself “dismayed” yesterday “by the terrorist attack in Paris that killed a German and injured several people,” in a message published in X.
“We will not give in to terrorism,” declared French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
French President Emmanuel Macron sent his “condolences to the family and friends of the German citizen” and wrote in X that his “thoughts” were with the injured. On Sunday morning, tourists strolled leisurely at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Some had not found out what had happened, while others assured AFP that they were not worried for their safety.
The attacker, who had already been booked for radical Islamic activities and psychiatric problems, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is great”) before being arrested, police sources said.
The attacker reportedly told the agents that he could no longer “bear” to see Muslims die “both in Afghanistan and in Palestine,” declared the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin.
He would also have expressed his discomfort with “what was happening in Gaza” and that France was “complicit in what Israel was doing” there, according to the minister.
Investigators will study the medical follow-up of the perpetrator, a man with a “very unstable and easily influenced profile,” a security source told AFP.
The Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, specified on Sunday that the attacker was undergoing psychiatric “monitoring”, but was not hospitalized.
The intelligence services had already arrested the attacker in 2016 for preparing a violent action in the business district of La Défense, in the west of Paris, according to a police source.
The same source told AFP that he had been sentenced to five years in prison and released after four years in prison.
Rajabpour-Miyandoab, who lived with his parents in the suburbs of the capital, published a video on his social networks in which he claimed responsibility for the attack, police and security sources confirmed to AFP.
In the recording, he refers to “current events, the government, the murder of innocent Muslims,” the security source detailed.
Investigators do not know for now the date on which the video was recorded, but they assure that it was published “simultaneously” with the event, he added.
The attack comes less than two months after the murder of a teacher in Arras, northern France, which raised the attack alert level to the highest level in the system.
Source: Ambito
