At least two people were wounded in a knife attack in front of the former offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Friday. The incident sparked a manhunt through the French capital and prompted France’s counterterrorism prosecutor’s office to launch an investigation.
The two victims, a man and a woman, were left with life-threatening injuries after being attacked on the street in front of the newspaper’s old building, according to reports. The pair were reportedly employees of the television production company “Premières Lignes,” which is based near the former Charlie Hebdo offices; many of the company’s staff had previously witnessed the 2015 terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, in which 12 people were killed.
French media reported that two suspects had been arrested in the area.
It’s not clear whether the attack has any link to the French satirical newspaper, which has repeatedly been targeted by radical Islamists for its ridicule of religion, and had received fresh threats only this month. But France’s national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation into Friday’s attack as an “attempted murder in relation with a terrorist enterprise.”
One witness told France’s Europe 1 radio that they were in their office and “heard screaming in the street.”
“I looked out of the window and saw a woman who was lying on the floor and had taken a whack in the face from what was possibly a machete.”
Police initially said that four people were injured. Officers had cordoned off the area after a suspect package was spotted nearby, but no explosives were found inside, according to reports.
Twelve people were killed in a jihadist attack on the newspaper’s offices in January 2015, and the newspaper had recently received fresh threats after it republished a series of inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed earlier this month.
READ: Charlie Hebdo is republishing the inflammatory Prophet Mohammed cartoons
The newspaper republished the cartoons to coincide with the start of the trial of 14 alleged accomplices of the terrorists who carried out the 2015 attacks.
The publication of the cartoons — including one of the Prophet with a bomb for a turban — drew protests and condemnation from a number of Muslim countries, as well as threats from Al Qaeda extremists of another massacre. The newspaper’s head of human resources, Marika Bret, told French magazine Le Point on Tuesday that police had considered the threats to be credible enough that officers had whisked her out of her home.
The new threats provoked a show of solidarity from the French media industry this week, with more than 100 outlets signing an open letter Wednesday declaring their support and denouncing, “new totalitarian ideologies, sometimes claiming to be inspired by religious texts.”
Charlie Hebdo relocated its offices out of the neighbourhood in the wake of the 2015 attacks. The widows of the attackers are due to testify in the trial Friday afternoon.
This is a developing story and will be updated when new information becomes available.
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