Another one on the ‘list’.
Paris (AFP) – Investigators on Sunday were probing the background of a 20-year-old Frenchman born in Russia who killed one man and wounded four other people during a stabbing spree, with sources close to the case saying he had been on a watchlist of suspected extremists.
The Saturday night attack in a lively area of theatres and restaurants near the main opera house was the latest in a series of suspected jihadist strikes in France that have killed some 245 people since 2015.
He was shot and killed by police after an officer unsuccessfully tried to stop him with a Taser.
Judicial sources said the man was born in Chechnya, a Muslim-dominated Russian republic which has been the scene of two bloody separatist wars since the 1990s.
Hundreds of Islamic militants from Chechnya have left to join terror groups in the Middle East, North Africa and other regions in recent years.
Russian news reports said the Russian embassy in Paris was pressing French officials for more information on the knifeman, whose parents have been taken into custody for questioning.
Investigators have not yet said when the man arrived in France.
The man, born in November 1997, was on France’s so-called “S file” of people suspected of radicalised views who could pose security risks, the sources said, though he did not have a criminal record.