2 wounded in Paris knife attack near Charlie Hebdo’s former office

Two people were wounded by a knife-wielding assailant in eastern Paris on Friday near the site of the former Charlie Hebdo office — the scene of a 2015 terrorist attack targeting the satirical newspaper that is the focus of an ongoing trial.

A primary suspect was arrested a short time later, authorities said.

Jean-François Ricard, France’s top anti-terrorism prosecutor, told reporters at the site of the attack that police had taken a second person into custody to verify “their connections to the main perpetrator.”

Ricard said prosecutors were opening a terrorism investigation because of the location of the attack — in front of the building where Charlie Hebdo had its offices at the time of the terrorist attack in January 2015 that left 12 people dead — and because of its timing. A trial is ongoing for several people accused of aiding the assailants in the 2015 attack.

Prime Minister Jean Castex, who cut short a scheduled speech when the attack took place, told reporters that the attack had occurred “in a symbolic location,” not far from a mural that pays tribute to the victims of the 2015 attack.

The assailant, who was not immediately identified, attacked “two people he knew nothing about and who were just taking a cigarette break,” Ricard said.

Their lives were not in danger, Castex said.

The two victims were employees of Premières Lignes, a documentary production company that is next door to the former Charlie Hebdo office. Some of its employees were the first witnesses to the January 2015 attack.

Luc Hermann, a journalist at Premières Lignes, told the BFM TV news channel that the two employees, a man and a woman, appeared to have been attacked “totally by chance.”

Hermann said that it was “a surprise attack, by a man armed with a very large bladed weapon,” who inflicted “extremely violent blows.” He blamed authorities for failing to secure the area surrounding Charlie Hebdo’s former offices.

He also noted that there had been “absolutely no security” on the street since the start of the trial, which he said was a major problem.

A few hours after the attack Friday, the satirical weekly wrote on Twitter that its “entire team offers its support and solidarity to his former neighbors and colleagues” at Premières Lignes, “and to the people affected by this heinous attack.”

The main suspect was arrested in the Bastille neighbourhood, an area in Paris not far from the site of the attack, according to police. Authorities initially gave a higher number of people injured, revising it later Friday.

Minutes after the attack, dozens of politicians from across the political spectrum posted messages on Twitter in support of the victims, some with the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie or #IAmCharlie, a popular refrain in the wake of the 2015 attack, although no connection between the two attacks has been officially established yet.

Schools and day care centres in the area went on lockdown as a precautionary measure before reopening later Friday.

While in recent years many attacks in France have targeted law enforcement officers, including in 2017 when a veteran police officer was shot and killed on the Champs-Élysées, assailants have also orchestrated indiscriminate attacks.

In March 2018, a gunman killed four people in a supermarket in southern France, including a police officer, and two months later an attacker stabbed five people near the Paris Opera, one fatally. In October 2019, a veteran police employee killed four of his colleagues in a knife attack at the headquarters of the Paris police, in what authorities later called a terrorist attack.

Al-Qaida, the terrorist group, had recently issued new threats against Charlie Hebdo, which moved after the 2015 attack to highly secured offices elsewhere. The threats followed the newspaper’s decision to reprint satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad at the opening of the trial of several people accused of aiding the assailants.

Marika Bret, Charlies Hebdo’s head of human resources, said this week that she had been forced to leave her home 12 days ago after her security guards received detailed and precise threats against her.

Speaking to the weekly Le Point, Bret, who has been living under police protection since 2015, said that the threats reflected “the unprecedented level of tension we are facing.”

In the 2015 attack, two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, stormed into the building that housed the satirical newspaper and fatally shot a maintenance worker. The brothers then forced at gunpoint a cartoonist who had just stepped outside to enter a security code to access the offices.

The gunmen entered as journalists were holding a weekly news meeting and opened fire with semi-automatic rifles, killing 10 people and critically injuring four others. They left the building less than two minutes later and shot and killed a police officer who tried to stop them as they fled. After a two-day manhunt, the Kouachi brothers were killed in a shootout with police in a small town north of Paris.

“Since the start of the trial and with the republication of the cartoons, we have received all kinds of horrors, including threats from al-Qaida and calls to finish the work of the Kouachi brothers,” Bret said.

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