It is very likely that he acted alone, it said. He had probably been preparing the attack for several weeks.
The fatal knife attack has reignited the debate in France about how to deal with jihadists. “The question arises as to whether we need to tighten the law to prevent something like this from happening again,” said government spokesman Olivier Véran to broadcaster RTL. “He fulfilled all the requirements and was still able to kill someone,” he added.
According to information from the public prosecutor’s office, the perpetrator, his parents and another person were in police custody. Parallel to the investigations by the French anti-terrorism public prosecutor’s office, the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe also initiated an investigation.
The 26-year-old attacked a small group of Filipino tourists near the Eiffel Tower on Saturday evening. When a taxi driver tried to intervene, he shouted “Allah is great.” A 23-year-old, who has German and Filipino citizenship, died from his injuries. The other two, including the girlfriend of the man killed, were physically uninjured but are in shock.
The perpetrator was well known to the authorities: he had been imprisoned for four years for planning a jihadist attack in Paris, then received psychological treatment for three years until last April and was still under surveillance by the secret service.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin accused the attacker’s doctors of errors in his psychiatric treatment. “There was obviously a failure,” Darmanin told broadcaster BFMTV. “The doctors explained several times that he was doing better, that he was more normal,” he said.
The right-wing populist opposition reiterated its demands to revoke French citizenship from attackers with dual nationality and to deport radicalized foreigners. “Then the secret services would have to observe far fewer people,” said the parliamentary group leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), Marine Le Pen, to the France Bleu broadcaster.
The perpetrator, Armand R., was born in the chic Paris suburb of Neuilly, came from an Iranian, non-religious family and had both French and Iranian nationality. He converted to Islam at 18 and soon turned to jihadist ideology.
On the evening of the crime, R. published a video about two minutes long in which he declared himself a member of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist militia. When he was arrested, he justified his actions by saying that he could not stand “the killing of Muslims in Afghanistan and Palestine.”
He published the video on the online service X (formerly Twitter) from an account that was only set up in October. There he had previously distributed numerous articles about Hamas and the situation in the Gaza Strip.
According to information from the newspaper “Le Parisien”, his victim, 23-year-old Collin, was a nurse. He initially worked in the Philippine city of San Fernando. He has been in Germany since January, where he works in a nursing home.
His girlfriend, who was uninjured thanks to the efforts of a taxi driver, is also a nurse. The two were on a vacation trip. The two injured people are a 65-year-old British tourist and a 60-year-old Frenchman.
According to information from the newspaper “Le Figaro”, 391 “Islamist terrorists” and 462 “inmates with a tendency to radicalization” are currently imprisoned in France. It is not just those who are being released from prison that are problematic, but also the approximately 50 convicts who are sentenced to long prison sentences and act as recruiters in prisons, the paper writes.
