The French capital was once again forced to nervous high alert on Thursday after officers shot dead a man who tried to enter a police station in Paris wielding a meat cleaver and wearing a fake suicide vest on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack, reports The Guardian.
The man was carrying a piece of paper marked with the Islamic State flag and an “unequivocal” claim of responsibility hand-written in Arabic, the Paris prosecutor said.
Investigators matched his fingerprints to those on file for a man convicted of theft in 2013. At that time he was homeless and had identified himself as Sallah Ali, born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1995, a source close to the investigation told AFP. But police had not yet officially confirmed the man’s identity.
The man approached the police station in the Goutte d’Or area, in Paris’s northern 18th arrondissement, between the Gare du Nord train station and the Sacre Coeur cathedral, at 11.30am – one year almost to the minute since the gun massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo which left 12 people dead.
Dressed in jeans and a padded jacket, he brandished a butcher’s knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar”, before being shot by police, the prosecutor said. Police union representatives said officers outside the police station had ordered the man to stop as he approached. But he continued towards them and reached into his jacket, so they fired.
The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said the officers had been “obliged to open fire”.
Bomb disposal teams rushed to the site after the man was seen to be wearing a pouch under his coat with a wire hanging from it. The area was sealed off and residents were told to close windows and stay away from balconies. Two nearby schools were closed with the children inside, as a precaution. But the device was found to be a fake and contained no explosives. The man, who had acted without covering his face, was carrying a mobile phone but no identification papers.
The incident is being investigated as a terrorist “attempted murder” of public officials in authority, the prosecutor said.
The attempted meat cleaver attack came just as the French president, François Hollande, was making a speech to security forces in a ceremony on the other side of the city at the Paris police HQ to mark the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings.