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A man who had served a prison sentence for planning a radical Islamist attack and who was undergoing psychiatric treatment allegedly stabbed a German tourist to death and wounded two others – one British, one French – in a neighbourhood near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday night.
The attack took place shortly after 9pm near the Bir Hakeim bridge in an area popular with tourists. France is on its highest alert for attacks against the background of the war between Israel and Hamas.
The alleged attacker first targeted a German couple near the bridge, fatally stabbing a 23-year-old man who was a German-Filipino citizen. A passing taxi driver intervened to stop him, but the suspect ran away across the bridge to the other side of the River Seine, attacking two more people – a 66-year-old British man and a 60-year-old French national. He allegedly injured one with a hammer.
Both suffered superficial physical injuries and were treated in hospital.
Patrick Pelloux, an emergency doctor on duty at the time of the attack, said the German-Filipino man who died, and his partner, were both nurses.
Police pursued the alleged attacker and used a stun gun to stop him. The 26-year-old was being questioned by anti-terrorism police on Sunday morning.
The UK Foreign Office said it was “supporting a British man who was injured in Paris and are in contact with the local authorities”, the BBC reported.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, sent his condolences to the family of the German citizen killed in what he called a “terrorist attack”. He thanked security forces for their quick arrest of the suspected attacker and said justice should be served “in the name of the French people”.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was “shocked by the terrorist attack in Paris”, saying it underlined the need to resolutely oppose hatred and terror.
The German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, condemned what she called an “abominable” crime, telling interviewers from the Funke media group that Berlin’s security services were “working closely” with Paris.
“The war in Gaza after Hamas’s terrorist act [of 7 October] has worsened the threat,” Faeser said, warning that “the threat of Islamist terrorism is acute and serious”.
“We will not give in to terrorism,” the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, wrote on X after the Paris attack. Borne was to hold a special security meeting with ministers on Sunday afternoon.
French anti-terror prosecutors are leading the investigation.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, visited the scene, telling reporters that the alleged attacker was known to authorities for radical Islamism.
Darmanin said the suspect, who was undergoing significant psychiatric treatment, had been arrested in 2016 and sentenced to four years in prison for planning a violent attack that he had failed to carry out because police had stopped him. He had undergone psychiatric treatment in prison and was continuing to receive treatment. He had been on a security services watchlist.
“A man attacked a couple who were foreign tourists. A German tourist who was born in the Philippines died from the stabbing,” Darmanin said.
Darmanin said the man had twice shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) before being arrested – once to the taxi driver and once to police officers. He had told police he could not stand Muslims being killed in “Afghanistan and Palestine”.
Darmanin said the man said France was “complicit” in “what Israel is doing in Gaza”. This was seen as a reference to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October.
The French health minister, Aurélien Rousseau, said the suspect was “being monitored in way that did not mean he was being hospitalised, he was supposed to follow a course of treatment” for psychiatric issues.
“As often in these cases, there’s a mixture of an ideology, an easily influenced person and, unfortunately, psychiatry,” Rousseau added.
The area by Bir-Hakeim bridge, usually thronging with tourists and locals, was cordoned off by police overnight.
Prosecutors said the suspected attacker, who was born in 1997 in the affluent town of Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris, was French and was being questioned in an investigation into murder and attempted murder “in connection with a terrorist plot”.
The suspect, whom prosecutors named to AFP as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, lived with his parents in the Essonne area, south of Paris. French media reported that when he was arrested in 2016, he had been a 19-year-old biology student and was accused of planning a violent attack in the business district, La Défense, west of Paris, which he failed to carry out. He was subsequently sentenced in 2018.
French media reported that his parents, of Iranian origin, were not Muslim. He was believed to have converted and been radicalised online.
“Paris is in mourning after this terrible attack,” the transport minister, Clément Beaune, wrote on X. Valérie Pécresse, the head of the île-de-France region, said: “All light must be shed on this attack in the heart of Paris.”
Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister wrote on X: “Hate and Terror have no place in Europe.”
Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which is the largest single opposition party in parliament, said: “French people will be asking how a man on a [watchlist], already convicted for having planned an attack, who was a notorious psychiatric case – how could he, in the current context, be able to walk freely and armed through Paris streets on a Saturday night. And French people would be right to ask this question.”
The country has suffered several terrorist attacks in the past decade, including the November 2015 suicide and gun attacks in Paris claimed by the Islamic State group in which 130 people were killed.
In October, a 20-year-old terrorist suspect who had been under surveillance walked into his old high school in Arras, northern France, and stabbed to death a French teacher, Dominique Bernard, and injured three others. The 57-year-old died from several wounds to the neck.
Tensions have risen in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations, following Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
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