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Four people injured in Paris Knife attack
 
By:
Fri, 25 Sep 2020   ||   Nigeria, Paris
 

Four people have been injured in a knife attack in Paris Friday outside the former offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Prime Minister Jean Castex disclosed this today, while the Paris police department reported that two of the victims were in a critical condition, adding that two suspects were on the run.

The Police later said one suspect had been detained after the attack, which occurred as the trial was underway for the alleged accomplices of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack.

“A serious event has taken place in Paris,” said Castex, who was addressing reporters at the time and cut short a visit to northern Paris to head instead to the crisis centre of the interior ministry.

“Four people have been wounded and it seems that two are in a serious condition,” the police said adding that the attack had taken place “in front of” the weekly’s former offices in the 11th district of central Paris.

The stabbing is linked to a trial which was underway in the capital for alleged accomplices of the authors of the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo where twelve people, including some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists, were killed in the attack by brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and claimed by a branch of Al Qaeda.

A female police officer was killed a day later, followed the next day by the killing of four men in a hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket by gunman Amedy Coulibaly.

The 14 defendants stand accused of having aided and abetted the perpetrators of the 2015 attacks, who were themselves killed in the wake of the massacres.

The magazine, defiant as ever, had marked the beginning of the trial by republishing hugely controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that had angered Muslims around the world.

Al-Qaeda then threatened Charlie Hebdo with a repeat of the 2015 massacre of its staff.

The trial in Paris had resumed Friday after a suspect’s corona virus test came back negative, while the hearing for the fourteen suspects, which opened on September 2, was postponed Thursday after Nezar Mickael Pastor Alwatik fell ill in the stand.

His lawyer Marie Dose said her client had suffered from “a lot of fever, coughing, vomiting and headaches”.

He was back in the box on Friday, after the presiding judge informed defence and prosecution lawyers by SMS late Thursday that the test results allowed for the trial to go ahead.

 

 

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