French police arrest man after he attacks three women with knives in Paris

PARIS – French police detained a man on July 27 after he attacked three women with knives before bystanders pinned him to the ground and an off-duty police officer detained him, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told reporters.

In the incident near Porte de Clichy, the man attacked the three women, aged 19, 24 and 36, with two kitchen knives, severely wounding two of them, Nunez said. One was hit in the lower back, the other in the abdomen, he added.

A video aired on Snapchat and verified by Reuters showed a man with long black hair wearing a cream tracksuit and wielding one big knife in each hand and attempting to attack and stab a young woman. It was unclear if the woman was injured.

“When I saw him stab a woman in the back, I started shouting, ‘Come on, let’s stop him!’ Several people stepped in,” Mohamed-Ali Bouhadjar, 26, who filmed the video and posted it on Snapchat, told Reuters.

“One person threw a suitcase at him. He dropped the knives. At that moment, I grabbed him, swept his legs out from under him, and we pinned him to the ground,” he added.

Another part of the video shows the same man lying on the ground immobilised by bystanders, while the two knives are lying nearby on a pedestrian crossing.

“It is Allah who commanded me,” the man lying on the floor said.

Nunez said the man had been detained by an off-duty police officer. “I pay tribute to him; it was a courageous act,” he added.

The motive of the attack remains unknown, Nunez said, adding that police could not verify the identity of the attacker, whose declarations were “incoherent” when he was being arrested.

The French national anti-terrorist prosecutor is “in observation” on whether to open an investigation. 

The attack comes after an Islamist radical in the German capital of Berlin ploughed a rented minivan into a Pride parade on July 25, killing one woman and wounding 29. REUTERS, AFP