The man who attacked a police officer with a knife under the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris on Friday night died in hospital from injuries he sustained when another police officer fired at him. announced the French authorities on Friday. TASR informs about it according to the reports of the AFP and DPA agencies. The investigation of the case was taken over by the National Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Terrorism, which is investigating a possible terrorist motive and the attacker’s membership in a terrorist organization.
- A man attacking with a knife in Paris died after the intervention of the police.
- President Macron called the attack an Islamist terrorist act.
In his post on Platform X, French President Emmanuel Macron called the incident an Islamist terrorist attack. The man was shot several times by police when he threatened officers during the ceremonial lighting of the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a police source told AFP. After one of the members of the honor guard suffered minor injuries with a knife, another police officer fired at the attacker. The man also had scissors with him.
According to AFP, the man was not known to the police. He was identified as Brahim Bahrír, a French citizen, born in 1978. The police put him on the watch list as a radicalized person. According to a source familiar with the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Bahrír had earlier called a police station near the Paris suburb where he lived and said he was going to “carry out a massacre.”
The man was previously sentenced to 17 years in prison in Belgium for attempted murder, terrorism and other crimes after attacking three police officers in 2012, according to authorities. He was later transferred to France and released from prison in late December, but remained under judicial supervision. Police cordoned off a memorial at the end of the busy Champs-Élysées boulevard in the French capital. President Macron praised the gendarmes who, according to him, “resolutely intervened and stopped this terrorist attack”.
