2023-12-04 01:58:09
A young German-Filipino tourist died Saturday evening near the Eiffel Tower at the hands of an assailant armed with a knife and a hammer, known to French authorities as a radical Islamist with an “unstable” mental state and who has already been in prison following a planned violent action in 2016. Here is what we know regarding this attack perpetrated in Paris less than two months following the bloody one in a high school in the north of France and following which the alert level was raised across the entire French territory.
Facts
The attack happened around 9:30 p.m. a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower and other places that are particularly lively on weekends and popular with tourists.
The assailant, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, first attacked a group of three people of Filipino origin, according to facts reported by anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard during a press conference on Sunday evening.
The attacker dealt two hammer blows and four stab wounds to one of the three people, a man with dual Filipino and German nationality, who died.
The other two people were not physically injured, the prosecutor stressed.
A taxi driver, seeing the scene, shouted at the attacker who then fled, crossing to the other side of the bridge following shouting “Allah akbar”, underlined Jean-François Ricard.
Police officers quickly dispatched to the scene pursued him. In front of them, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab once more shouted “Allah akbar”, making people believe that he was wearing an explosive belt.
He then hit two passers-by once more in the head with a hammer. They are a 60-year-old Frenchman and a 66-year-old British man, injured in the eye, according to the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office (Pnat).
The assailant was then arrested near a square following receiving two shots with an electric pulse gun. He has since been in police custody.
Three members of his family or those close to him were also taken into custody, according to the anti-terrorism prosecutor.
The victims
First there is a group of three people of Filipino origin: a 23-year-old man, who also has German nationality, died following being stabbed and hammered. His partner was not attacked “physically”, but is “extremely shocked”, according to Mr. Darmanin.
According to Jean-François Ricard, the two people who accompanied the deceased victim “remain particularly shocked”. “They are still under medical surveillance and have not been able to be heard for the moment,” said the prosecutor.
For their part, the two men attacked with a hammer “are today in good physical health,” the Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, said on Sunday. They had “superficial traumas”, but their “psychological traumas will be immense”.
They returned home, Mr. Ricard said.
The author
Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab is a 26-year-old Franco-Iranian, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of Paris, to Iranian refugee parents.
In a naturalization decree published in the Official Journal in 2002, he is presented with the first name “Iman”, but in the jihadist sphere he was called “Amine” and asked his parents to do the same.
At the time a biology student, he was sentenced to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy to prepare an act of terrorism, including one year suspended and probation for three years.
Released from prison in 2020, he was monitored for significant psychiatric disorders and was included in the automated judicial file for perpetrators of terrorist offenses.
“Given certain incidents, in particular contact on social networks with […] the future author of the assassination of Samuel Paty, the Pnat had obtained a strengthening of the obligations to which the individual was subject,” reported the prosecutor in reference to this teacher murdered in 2020.
After a new psychiatric assessment, he was subject to a care order involving tighter psychiatric monitoring and controlled by a coordinating doctor, until the end of April 2023.
At the end of October, his mother reported to the police her concern regarding the behavior of her son, who “was withdrawing into himself”, recounted the anti-terrorism prosecutor.
Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab comes from a family with no religious commitment. He converted to Islam at the age of 18 in 2015 and very quickly fell into Islamist ideology, according to the account of Jean-François Ricard.
He had established links with individuals anchored in jihadist ideology, some of whom were already active in the Iraqi zone.
The assailant, listed for Islamist radicalization, published a protest video in Arabic on the networks in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State armed group.
This video was posted online on his X account, which included “numerous publications on Hamas, Gaza and more generally Palestine”, according to the anti-terrorism prosecutor.
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