Investigators on Sunday were probing the background of a 20-year-old Frenchman born in Chechnya who killed one man and wounded four other people in a stabbing spree in central Paris, an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.
The Saturday night attack in a lively area of theatres and restaurants near the city’s historic opera house was the latest in a series of apparent Islamist strikes in France that have killed 246 people since 2015.
Panic broke out on the neighbourhood’s bustling streets with people fleeing into bars and restaurants as the man walked along stabbing people, yelling “Allahu akbar” (“God is greater”) before police shot him dead.
Police identified the assailant as Khamzat Azimov, who grew up with his family in Strasbourg, eastern France, a source close to the inquiry told AFP. The city is home to many refugees from the Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya.
He became a French citizen in 2010 after his mother was naturalised, government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux told French television.
Separately, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on the Telegraph messenger app that the attacker had obtained a Russian passport when he was 14, before obtaining French nationality.
Investigators have detained Azimov’s parents for questioning in Paris, and searched the rooms the family rents in an apartment in northern Paris.
But a source close to the inquiry said “no incriminating element” had been found in the search.
A friend of Azimov’s in Strasbourg, also born in 1997, has been taken into custody for questioning.
Although Azimov had no criminal record, he had been on both of France’s main watchlists for suspected radicals — the so-called “S file” as well as a more targeted File for the Prevention of Terrorist Radicalisation (FSPRT), which focuses on people judged to be terror threats — since 2016.
Hundreds of fighters from Chechnya have joined Islamic militant groups in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere in recent years, following two bloody separatist wars against Russian-backed authorities in the 1990s and 2000s.
