A series of violent attacks has put French police on alert ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris. While the incidents are unrelated, police suspect that at least some of them are terrorism-related, RFI reports.
France is on the highest security alert as it prepares to host millions of visitors, athletes and world leaders during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
On Friday, police arrested on terrorism charges a man who tried to kill a taxi driver with a knife while expressing support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
The man, known to authorities as a radicalised man, stopped a taxi in the city of Le Mans on Tuesday night while waving a gun. He reportedly forced the driver out of the car, tied him up and stabbed him in the neck with a blade. The driver managed to escape to the home of a local resident where he was treated.
The attacker was arrested early Friday morning in Yvelines, west of Paris, and is being investigated on charges of terrorism, attempted murder and kidnapping.
The policeman was stabbed to death
Meanwhile, French prosecutors said on Friday that the attacker who stabbed a French police officer in the Champs-Elysees neighbourhood of Paris is also suspected of killing a teenager earlier in the day.
A police officer shot and killed the suspect on Thursday after he attacked another officer with a knife. The wounded police officer is expected to survive.
The attacker – a prefectural source told news agencies a 27-year-old Senegalese national previously known to police – later died of his wounds.
The prosecutor’s office in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre said the attacker was suspected of fatally stabbing a 16-year-old in a flat in Courbevoie, northwest of the capital, earlier in the day. The attacker’s parents told police their son was renting the flat. He had mental health problems and had already run away from home and a psychiatric hospital, they said.
Assault on a soldier
Earlier this week, a soldier was injured by a man armed with a knife at a railway station. The suspect is a man with psychiatric problems and violent tendencies.
Meanwhile, authorities are also investigating whether a man who rammed a car into a cafe terrace on Wednesday night was intentional.
The attacks came just over a week before the opening of the Olympic Games, for which some 35,000 police and gendarmes and 18,000 French military personnel will be mobilised daily.
