A French national of Chechen origin stabbed a person to death on the streets of central Paris on Saturday evening and wounded four others, in an assault that French investigators were treating as a terrorist attack.
Police shot and killed the man shortly after the attack began, French authorities said.
Paris prosecutor François Molins said the man yelled “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great” in Arabic—during the stabbing, indicating the attack was the latest in a string of assaults committed by Islamist extremists in France.
A French judicial official said the man had previously been flagged as a potential terror risk in one of France’s security databases, where the government keeps the names of thousands of people who have expressed sympathy for radical Islam.
Islamic State quickly claimed the assault via its Amaq media service, calling the assailant a “soldier” of the extremist group.
The attack took place near the Palais Garnier, the opulent Parisian ballet and opera house, a neighborhood packed with restaurants and bars that was crowded with Saturday evening revelers. Police cordoned off the area for hours, interviewing witnesses and searching for any potential accomplices of the attacker.
The judicial official described the slain assailant as a French citizen who was born in Chechnya, without releasing his name.
France has been on high alert since January 2015 when gunmen killed 17 in the Paris region, including 12 at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. In November 2015, a team of militants sent by Islamic State from territory it then controlled in Syria killed 130 people in and around Paris, one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history.
Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in the south of Russia, has been a major source of foreign fighters in the ranks of Islamic State. Western security officials have also been concerned about radicalization among Chechens living in Europe and the U.S.CONTINUE AT SITE
