A 20-year-old French national of Chechen origin, who was considered by security services as a surveillance target because of his interest in radical Islam, carried out the series of apparently random knife attacks in central Paris on Saturday evening, killing one 29-year-old man and wounding four other people, two of them seriously.
The attacks were carried out on the restaurant-lined rue Monsigny, situated close to the Garnier Opera building in central Paris, shortly before 9pm. The so-called Islamic State group (IS) later claimed responsibility in a statement issued by its Amaq propaganda agency. “The perpetrator of this knife attack in Paris is a soldier of the Islamic State and the operation was led in reprisal against the coalition states,” it said, in reference to the international military coalition, of which France is a leading member, that has led attacks against IS in the Middle East.
Senior Paris public prosecutor François Molins, who visited the scene late on Saturday, announced the opening of an investigation into “murder, and attempted murder in relation to a terrorist project”, adding: “On the basis of witness accounts which spoke of the fact that the assailant shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ while attacking passers-by with a knife, given the operational mode, we have [handed the investigation] to the anti-terrorist branch of the Paris prosecution services,” said Molins.
The attacker, who was named as Khamzat Azimov, was shot dead by police who arrived rapidly at the scene. The first call to emergency services as the attacks began was registered at 8.47pm and Azimov was pronounced dead nine minutes later. French Prime minister Édouard Philippe, who later visited the scene of the attacks, praised the “exceptional reactivity” and “calm” of the police officers who intervened. They reportedly attempted to disarm Azimov with Taser stun guns, before opening fire after that attempt failed.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Azimov was reported to have carried no identity papers but was identified by his fingerprints. French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux on Sunday said Azimov was born in Chechnya in 1997. He moved to France with his parents and was given French nationality automatically after his mother was naturalised as French in 2010. Media reports said he latterly lived with his parents in the 18th arrondissement in the north of Paris, but had spent most of his childhood and schooling in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, where one person was arrested on Sunday for questioning about the attack.
Azimov, whose parents were also arrested on Sunday for questioning, was listed on what the French authorities call the “Fiche S”, for S file, a database of thousands of people considered to represent a potential threat to national security, which includes those displaying a particular interest in the jihadist movement but also those involved in, or close to, other criminal activity.
The rampage on Saturday evening was the second terrorist attack to result in fatalities in France since the beginning of the year. The first was on March 23rd in the south-west of the country, in the town of Carcassonne and nearby Trèbes, when a heavily armed gunman acting in the name of IS, Redouane Lakdim, 25, hijacked a car, attacking its occupants and taking hostages at a supermarket, killing four people.
Ever since IS began suffering military defeats in large areas it once occupied in Syria and in Iraq, attacks in its name have multiplied across Europe. The countries particularly targeted include Germany (six attacks), Britain (five attacks) and Belgium (also five attacks), while Spain was the target of a notably murderous attack on August 17th 2017 when vehicles were driven into crowds in the city of Barcelona and the town of Cambrils killing 16 people. Meanwhile, Sweden and Finland have suffered the first such jihadist attacks on their national territory.
France however remains a priority target for the terrorists and is the European country where most of the attacks commissioned by IS, or prompted by support for the group, have taken place. Since the end of 2014, a total of 12 terrorist outrages have been committed in the country, leaving a death toll of 246, including the man murdered in the attack in Paris on Saturday evening. Since 2014, another 17 attacks failed to cause casualties and, according to official figures, 42 others were foiled in the planning stages. In 2017 alone, five attacks were carried out, six were attempted but failed, and 20 were discovered in the planning stages according to the independent centre for studies on terrorism activities, the Centre d’analyse du terrorisme (CAT).
While since last autumn the production of IS propaganda for media publication, notably on the internet, has diminished, at the end of October it published a photo-illustrated call in French for supporters to carry out knife attacks during Halloween festivities in France. At Christmas time, the Eiffel Tower was one of the sites it named as a target. It has also encouraged its supporters to attack sports personalities during this summer’s football World Cup tournament in Russia, naming as targets the French national team coach Didier Deschamps, along with Argentine player Lionel Messi, Brasil’s Neymar and Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo.
At the end of 2016, a Moroccan anti-terrorism agency, (the Bureau national de la lutte contre le terrorisme marocain) questioned an aspiring jihadist whose nom de guerre is Abou Omar al-Andaloussi and who was implicated in a terrorist plot targeting France. In his recorded statement, he said “jihadist leaders in IS place great importance on the French capital”. He said that this was in part due to France’s involvement in the international military coalition against IS in Syria and Iraq, but also because Paris represented for them “the symbol of secularity, corruption and moral depravity under cover of [defending] individual freedom and human rights”.
In 2017, terrorist attacks in France were characterised by the fact they were carried out by endogenous perpetrators. A high-ranking source within French intelligence services told Mediapart that this was a specific phenomenon, adding that, “In Europe, perpetrators are notably migrants who carry out acts in their countries of adoption”. An exception to this was Tunisian national Ahmed Hanachi, who on October 1st 2017 murdered two young women, Laura Paumier and her cousin Mauranne Harel, in a knife attack outside the Saint-Charles railway station in the southern city of Marseille. Of the 12 terrorist attacks carried out in France since the end of 2014, in which a total of 22 terrorists took part, only Hanachi and two Syrian suicide bombers, who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France sports stadium in the Paris attacks of November 13th 2015, were illegally present in the country. Six others involved in the 12 attacks were foreign nationals who had legal residency status.
The attack on Saturday evening in Paris, like that carried out by Hanachi in Marseille, involved very basic terrorist strategy, what the country’s intelligence services term as “weak intensity”. These are opportunistic attacks, carried out by local jihadists who for whatever reason had not joined the IS ranks in the Middle East, using the crude means at their disposal to strike against their country of residence.
Examples of these types of attacks include the murder of French police officer Jean-Baptiste Salvaing on June 13th 2016, who died outside his home west of Paris from nine stab wounds inflicted by Larossi Abballa, a French national of Moroccan family origin who then entered the house and murdered the officer’s partner Jessica Schneider, a police administrative worker, in front of their infant son. Jessica Schneider died after her throat was cut.
One month later, on July 26th 2016, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean knifed to death an 85-year-old French priest, Jacques Hamel, during mass in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy, and seriously wounded a parishioner. When police stormed the building after the pair took other parishioners present hostage, the assailants were shot dead. Apart from their knives, their weapons included a replica firearm and pretend explosives.
'Several cases demonstrate that candidates for violent action are numerous'
Those examples contrast with the arsenal employed in the foiled attack on August 21st 2015 against passengers on the Amsterdam-Paris express train Thalys, when Ayoub El-Khazzani emerged from a toilet cubicle armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and nine cartridges totalling 270 bullets, and a Luger handgun.
They also contrast with the weaponry of Sid Ahmed Ghlam, currently in detention in France for his suspected murder of a 32-year-old dance instructor, Aurélie Châtelain, on April 19th 2015, while readying to attack two churches in the Paris suburb of Villejuif. It was found that Ghlam, born in Algeria in 1991, followed instructions by phone from a source in Syria that led him to a vehicle in a car park where in its boot were four assault rifles, two automatic pistols (including a Sig Sauer stolen from a police officer near Paris in 2010), ammunition and five bullet-proof vests.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The November 13th 2015 attacks in Paris, which claimed the lives of 130 victims, and the March 22nd 2016 attacks in Brussels, at the Belgian capital’s airport and a metro station, which left 32 people dead, involved a massive arsenal of weapons and explosives. The Brussels-based IS coordinator of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is reported to have told a fellow jihadist that the terrorist cell he belonged to had obtained 25 kilos of TNT in Belgium.
But today IS operatives have lesser means at their disposal. The last known major attack planned by the IS and directed by its senior French member, Boubakeur El-Hakim, who was eventually killed in a US drone attack in Raqqa in November 2016, involved a terrorist cell in the city of Strasbourg, eastern France. Its members were arrested days before his death, on the night of November 19th 2016 when their projected attack was still the planning stages; while police discovered they were in possession of two automatic pistols and a machine gun, a Moroccan national from the cell arrested near Marseille was found to have a significant cash sum intended for the purchase of more weapons but which he had been unable to find.
On February 14th this year, Patrick Calvar, the then-head of the France’s internal intelligence services, the DGSI, told a parliamentary foreign affairs commission of inquiry: “Several cases have demonstrated to us that the candidates for violent action are numerous, but they come up against logistical problems, in particular for obtaining weapons.”
One of the reasons for this was the discovery of an arms cache by security services in early 2016. That followed the arrest in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt on March 24th 2016 of Reda Kriket, a one-time armed robber who operated in the Paris region. Several years ago he became involved with the jihadist cause through contact with the same Brussels-based Islamic preacher who influenced both Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the November 13th 2015 attacks in Paris, and also Najim Laachraoui, who acted as the explosives expert for Abaaoud’s cell in Brussels. Following his arrest, Kriket led police to a location in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers where, according to senior Paris public prosecutor François Molins, they discovered “an arsenal of a size never before seen”.
This amounted to 45 kilos of arms and explosives. There were five assault rifles, seven handguns and a machine gun of Croat origin, along with six containers of glycerine, 1.3 kilos of industrial explosives, 500 grams of TATP (an explosive more difficult to detect than others and which was used in the Paris November 2015 and Brussels March 2016 attacks), electric detonators and four boxes of ball bearings. It appeared that the cache belonged to Abaaoud’s cell.
But more importantly, the difficulty for the terrorists to obtain weapons for their attacks is a structural one. Phone taps carried out by security services in France and elsewhere in Europe have shown that the jihadists were recently finding it difficult to obtain military weapons. Arms traffickers have become increasingly cautious about who their clients are. “They are very pragmatic businessmen,” one senior French security source told Mediapart. “They look at what it earns them, and what it costs them. Now, the least European [arms] trafficker has understood that if his weapons are found not in a hold-up or a settling of scores [in the criminal gang environment] but rather in a terrorist attack they run the risk of life imprisonment, and that borders won’t protect them. When needed, if the constraints of law are too strong, he’ll finish up at the bottom of a lake and his own country won’t complain about it. Traffickers have well taken that in.”
The DGSI believes that the lack of ‘professionalism’ of would-be terrorists who have not been trained in the Middle East plays a part, because of a lack of weaponry expertise and few contacts with the criminal underworld, as much as financial difficulties. Last year there were cases of some who tried to obtain weapons through legal means, using a licence for shooting sports to attempt to buy shotguns and other arms.
Thus the threat has begun moving from attacks planned from the Syria-Iraqi zone and led by battle-hardened jihadists, as was the case in the Paris and Brussels attacks, to what are now more elementary attacks carried out by isolated individuals. However, more complex operations have not been completely abandoned by the terrorists, with the use of explosives still a threat, and notably through the production of TATP as advised in IS technical propaganda. During the French presidential election campaign last year, two jihadists were arrested in Marseille where they were found to be in the final production stages of three kilos of TATP they had prepared themselves.
Despite the military defeats of IS in Syria and Iraq, its ability to mobilise supporters remains intact, as demonstrated on Saturday in Paris. “The determination of assailants to die as martyrs, according to the doctrine on suicide attacks favoured by IS, encourages actions and allows for the success of acts carried out with the use of summary operational modes,” commented one senior DGSI officer in a conversation with Mediapart.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse