Arrested on Saturday after the death in Paris of a German tourist, stabbed to death, and the attack on two other people with a hammer, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a young Frenchman from the Paris region, was known to the courts for his Radical Islamism and its psychiatric disorders.
A German man was killed and two other people were injured in a knife and hammer attack near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday evening. The attacker, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, was arrested shortly after the incident and placed in police custody. The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) has taken up the investigation for assassination and attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise and for criminal terrorist association.
“The attack happened shortly after 9 p.m. between the quai de Grenelle and Bir-Hakeim, the attacker attacked a couple of tourists,” reported the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. “The man died from stabbing” and the attacker “attacked the wife of this German tourist”, but her life was saved “thanks to a taxi driver who saw the scene “.
The attacker then crossed the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Pursued by the police, he clearly attacked two other people whose lives were not in danger: one person was injured following a hammer blow to the eye and another was particularly “shocked”, always according to the story of Gérald Darmanin. At the time of the events, shortly after 9 p.m., near the Bir-Hakeim bridge, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab shouted “Allah akbar! » (“God is great!”) several times, the minister said. The life of the suspect, who was neutralized by the police using a Taser, is not in danger.
After his arrest, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab. told the police that he was angry “at what was happening in Gaza, that France would be complicit in what Israel was doing.” “He would have said that he was tired of seeing Muslims die, both in Afghanistan and in Palestine,” said the interior minister.
Very shortly before the attack, a video demanding his action was posted on social networks. In the video, the attacker mentions “the news, the government, the murder of innocent Muslims,” detailed a security source cited by Agence France-Presse (AFP). At this stage, investigators do not know when it was filmed, but it was posted online “concurrently” with the act, according to this source.
Speaking in Arabic in this video, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a 26-year-old Franco-Iranian, provided “his support for jihadists acting in different areas,” anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said at a press conference. “This video was notably posted online on his X account (formerly Twitter)”, opened at the beginning of October and which included “numerous publications on Hamas, Gaza and more generally Palestine”, according to the magistrate. Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
Born in France in 1997 to Iranian parents, with whom he lives in Essonne, the young man, “fiché S”, had already been arrested by domestic intelligence (DGSI) in 2016 for a planned attack on Defense, in Hauts-de-Seine. At the time, he was suspected of having planned a stabbing attack in the business district west of Paris, at the instigation of a jihadist established in Syria, Maximilien Thibault, former member of Forsane Alizza .
He was sentenced to five years in prison and was released in 2020, after four years of detention, said a security source cited by AFP. He had been placed under judicial supervision and under Micas, an administrative system accompanied by measures comparable to those of judicial supervision, and aimed at preventing acts of terrorism.
Known for his psychiatric disorders and his radical Islamism, he had undergone psychiatric medical treatment throughout his detention and after his release. “The first months were encouraging”, he seemed to have “detached himself from religion” after his release, a security source told AFP. But this man with a “very impressionable”, “very unstable” personality has been causing concerns again since spring 2022, according to this same source. According to the Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab “had follow-up which was not follow-up where he had to be hospitalized, he had to undergo treatment”.
Police sources claim that as of March 2022, he stopped his drug treatment (atypical neuroleptic), in agreement with his doctor. Five months later, in August 2022, a psychiatric expertise concluded that psychological monitoring and an order for treatment were necessary. An assessment that the sentencing judge ordered him to follow on September 19, 2022.
Care in accordance with medical orders was then provided to the assailant and appointments were respected according to the end of measure report of March 15. The psychologist of the support pair, also made up of a specialized educator, noted a positive evolution of the attacker. As of April 21, 2023, the doctor coordinating care monitoring in his successive reports did not conclude that there was a need to resume medication monitoring. No psychiatric danger had been identified.